Though for copyright, starting a suit can show other potential infringers that you are willing to litigate and that can have a silencing effect on people.
I think that is true for trademark* but not for copyright. A copyright is a monopoly, trademark is based on use. Even then, the big issue is preventing a trademark from becoming "generic". The most famous example of this in the US is that "aspirin" became a generic term for headache medicine. In Europe, Bayer still holds a trademark on Aspirin. Xerox had to spend a lot of money on a PR campaign to make sure that Xerox did not become a generic term for "photocopy"
American society is sexually repressed in that we are still having strong socio-political battles over things like proper sex education. There are still a lot of people with a lot of political clout who think that official US policy should be Abstinence Only. They do not want high school students taught on the proper uses of contraception.
You are right to note though that most Americans will have sex before they get married and many will have sex before they are college freshman. This is why we have a problem with teen pregnancy. Ironically or not, there is more teen pregnancy in red states with Abstinence Only sex-ed policies.
America also has a problem with drinking because we have a too-high legal drinking age (21) and many parents do not teach their kids to drink responsibly. My parents use to drink a bit of alcohol with dinner every night and taught me that was the purpose of drinking. Many Americans seem to think that the purpose is to get smashed.
Contrast this to the Scandanavian where it is apparently normal and acceptable for teenagers to have their boyfriends and girlfriends sleep over with parental permission (after a frank and open discussion about sex with their parents). Or France and Italy where parents teach their kids how to drink in moderation and allow them a little bit of alcohol to build up tolerance.
American parents seem to just want to avoid awkward conversations with their kids.
"As to seat belts, absolutely. It’s your business and your business only."
Is it really? Seat-belts save lives just like sleep-hours for long-haul bus drivers. Seat Belts do not prevent an accident but it does prevent someone from being hurt more than they would if they did not have a seat belt. A seat belt might diminish or erase the need for emergency medical response and then free resources that can be used for more unpreventable accidents like a person who has a heart attack at work and needs to be rushed to the hospital. The seat belt might also make an accident a quicker clean up and let traffic flow normally at a quicker pace.
A parody of 50 shades can only improve the dreck of the original.
Here we should also note the irony that 50 shades started out as Twilight fanfic. So that is probably the biggest hypocrisy. 50 shades started out as a copyright violation.
Though I am very curious about how free speech, fair use, and fanfic interact with copyright law. I wonder how the courts would view it.
Is Hollywood being hypocritical? I'm not sure. From my study of Intellectual Property, a good deal of the lawsuits covering copyright and trademark infringement are more about being butt-hurt than anything else. Matel sued the band Aqua/Universal Music over the song Barbie Girl. Judge Kozinski (spelling?) told both the plaintiff and defendant that they needed to chill out in his published opinion.
What is your solution? What do you want society to be like? Would you rather us be puritans who did not read 50 shades or abandon Evangelical Christianity all together?
The entirety of the Human Condition might be hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways but both ways is the only way we seem to want it.
It might also be worth noting that Hollywood is not an Evangelical industry. Almost every major studio (exceptions Universal Artists and Disney*) were founded by poor Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. The Hayes Code was once described as "Catholics making Jewish films safe for a Protestant audience". I can't remember where I heard or read that description.
*Disney was a notorious anti-Semite and racist of course.
This is sort of what I meant. They say these things but they don't inact any policies that mesh with their message. If anything the Palinista's are very good at creating policies that are a further race to the bottom for their target audience.
Though I think that populist Democratic politicians and populist Republican politicians are speaking to two very different audiences. The GOP populists are speaking to those who have Jeffersonian agrarian fantasies of being a self-sufficient yeoman of sorts. Democratic populist politicians are speaking to an audience that is not fond or desiring of yeoman fantasies and might not even have any desire to be a small business person. The target Democratic audience wants security and welfare, not the chance to be entruepenuers. Basically it is like watching people from different worlds try to compete.
I can see how that can work for immigration. It is somewhat presumptive that everyone is going to know someone who knows a lawyer.
Being born and raised in the upper-middle and professional classes, I can probably ask around for a whole range of services: law, medicine, a good cleaning person, a gardener, a carpenter, interior designer, tailor, etc. If someone grew up outside of those communities, I can see how it could be very hard to find a lawyer. We live in an era of mass-educational segregation and this does not benefit the poor or working classes.
Doesn't Sarah Palin represent that pro-Capitalist, anti-Elitist kind of right-wing populism?
The GOP has been drumming this beat for years. Possibly my entire life (and I am older than you), I don't see them have any policies that are actually pro-Capitalist while being anti-Elitist at the same time. I know the GOP likes to fancy themselves as the party of yeoman and small business but most of their policies seem to favor huge corporations and the powers that be.
False Conciousness comes to mind when viewing the Palin wing of the Republican Party. Their verbal claims do not match their policies or actions.
Then again, this is the kind of populism that would call an actress making 30,000 a year an elitist because she lives in New York and maybe went to Smith.
It doesn't change the reasoning for the original AVA ethics rules. One of the lawyer's who devised them at the begging of the 20th century was explicit in saying that they were designed to make it hard for "Russian Jew Boys" (and other minorities) to earn a living as lawyers.
This was in my ethics textbook. I can't find the citation on Google.
Now these are interesting cases. Do you have a free speech right to advertise a quasi-legal or illegal industry?
IIRC the Supreme Court refused to hear a case concerning brothel/escort advertisements in Clark County (home of Las Vegas). Prostitution is legal everywhere in Nevada but Clark County. The question was whether escorts and brothels could advertise in Clark County.
As I mentioned below, the bans on attorney advertising are often great for corporations but bad for individual clients.
How is someone supposed to find a plaintiff's firm to handle their employment discrimination or product liability case? Or a criminal defense lawyer to handle their burglary charge? Or an immigration lawyer to help prevent their deportation?
Yes some lawyers can be very imaginative with their advertisements but I want to hear a better way for individual and small-business clients to find a lawyer.
There was some discriminatory reasoning behind the ban's on attorney advertising.
Notice that most lawyers who advertise are in sections of law that are considered less than elite and serve a less than elite clientele: Personal Injury, Immigration, Divorce, Criminal Defense, etc. This is not white shoe law.
At one point, most of the lawyers who practiced these forms of law were non-WASPs who could not get into the Corporate firms. The bans against advertising were meant to keep the profession august and responsible by denying new hands a chance to compete.
I do not support prohibitions against lawyer and doctor advertising because it tends to be very pro-Corporate defense and very bad for individual clients who need to sue corporations.
Disclaimer: I'm a plaintiff's lawyer and my heart is with the plaintiff.
Where do the chuggers come in on this scale? Somewhere between the last two options? One of the more annoying things about SF is that the weather is temperte enough for the chuggers to be out most of the year.
Also Movember (as much as I hate the portmandeau) is probably a more frequent variant than climb Everest.
I am always surprised about how many people parent's did not drink in front of them while they were growing up.
My parents were always a glass or two of wine with supper types. This made me think of alcohol as something to drink with meals. Not a binge and party drink. I also got to have a little bit with shabbat. All in all, this turned me into a rather moderate drinker.
Our lack of public transportation is also a problem. Unless you live in a handful of cities, you need to take your car to go out.
"So then, what’s the breaking point for Republicans? At what point do they realize that they’re losing to a guy who is better than their candidates? At what point do they acknowledge that maybe it’s Obama and not a complex series of churning conspiracies? Or does it simply never happen?"
I think it is going to get worse before it gets better. There is also the possibility of the Republican Party going the way of the dodo and being replaced by a center-right party and a far right party.
About a quarter of the electorate will always be far-right extremists of the current mode. Right now they can assert a lot of influence in the GOP. John Judis notes that the Club for Growth is already trying to stack the deck against reasonable conservatives for questioning Orthodoxies. In a system with multiple parties, this 25 percent would only control a handful of seats and that is it.
On “The Hypocrisy of Hollwood as a Model for American Society”
Though for copyright, starting a suit can show other potential infringers that you are willing to litigate and that can have a silencing effect on people.
"
I think that is true for trademark* but not for copyright. A copyright is a monopoly, trademark is based on use. Even then, the big issue is preventing a trademark from becoming "generic". The most famous example of this in the US is that "aspirin" became a generic term for headache medicine. In Europe, Bayer still holds a trademark on Aspirin. Xerox had to spend a lot of money on a PR campaign to make sure that Xerox did not become a generic term for "photocopy"
"
American society is sexually repressed in that we are still having strong socio-political battles over things like proper sex education. There are still a lot of people with a lot of political clout who think that official US policy should be Abstinence Only. They do not want high school students taught on the proper uses of contraception.
You are right to note though that most Americans will have sex before they get married and many will have sex before they are college freshman. This is why we have a problem with teen pregnancy. Ironically or not, there is more teen pregnancy in red states with Abstinence Only sex-ed policies.
America also has a problem with drinking because we have a too-high legal drinking age (21) and many parents do not teach their kids to drink responsibly. My parents use to drink a bit of alcohol with dinner every night and taught me that was the purpose of drinking. Many Americans seem to think that the purpose is to get smashed.
Contrast this to the Scandanavian where it is apparently normal and acceptable for teenagers to have their boyfriends and girlfriends sleep over with parental permission (after a frank and open discussion about sex with their parents). Or France and Italy where parents teach their kids how to drink in moderation and allow them a little bit of alcohol to build up tolerance.
American parents seem to just want to avoid awkward conversations with their kids.
"
"As to seat belts, absolutely. It’s your business and your business only."
Is it really? Seat-belts save lives just like sleep-hours for long-haul bus drivers. Seat Belts do not prevent an accident but it does prevent someone from being hurt more than they would if they did not have a seat belt. A seat belt might diminish or erase the need for emergency medical response and then free resources that can be used for more unpreventable accidents like a person who has a heart attack at work and needs to be rushed to the hospital. The seat belt might also make an accident a quicker clean up and let traffic flow normally at a quicker pace.
"
A parody of 50 shades can only improve the dreck of the original.
Here we should also note the irony that 50 shades started out as Twilight fanfic. So that is probably the biggest hypocrisy. 50 shades started out as a copyright violation.
Though I am very curious about how free speech, fair use, and fanfic interact with copyright law. I wonder how the courts would view it.
"
I am not really sure what to make of this post.
Is Hollywood being hypocritical? I'm not sure. From my study of Intellectual Property, a good deal of the lawsuits covering copyright and trademark infringement are more about being butt-hurt than anything else. Matel sued the band Aqua/Universal Music over the song Barbie Girl. Judge Kozinski (spelling?) told both the plaintiff and defendant that they needed to chill out in his published opinion.
What is your solution? What do you want society to be like? Would you rather us be puritans who did not read 50 shades or abandon Evangelical Christianity all together?
The entirety of the Human Condition might be hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways but both ways is the only way we seem to want it.
It might also be worth noting that Hollywood is not an Evangelical industry. Almost every major studio (exceptions Universal Artists and Disney*) were founded by poor Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. The Hayes Code was once described as "Catholics making Jewish films safe for a Protestant audience". I can't remember where I heard or read that description.
*Disney was a notorious anti-Semite and racist of course.
On “Conservatives’ Jim DeMint Problem”
Well said.
I don't have anything to add except a general observation that Jim DeMint always reminded me of Foghorn Leghorn.
On “Two Lesser Known Freedom of Speech Cases”
This is sort of what I meant. They say these things but they don't inact any policies that mesh with their message. If anything the Palinista's are very good at creating policies that are a further race to the bottom for their target audience.
Though I think that populist Democratic politicians and populist Republican politicians are speaking to two very different audiences. The GOP populists are speaking to those who have Jeffersonian agrarian fantasies of being a self-sufficient yeoman of sorts. Democratic populist politicians are speaking to an audience that is not fond or desiring of yeoman fantasies and might not even have any desire to be a small business person. The target Democratic audience wants security and welfare, not the chance to be entruepenuers. Basically it is like watching people from different worlds try to compete.
"
That is largely what I meant. I see the advertisements as setting up the relationship more than anything else.
Though I don't see much doctor advertising beyond cosmetic dentistry and Dr. Zizmor in New York.
On “Taxpayer-Directed Welfare”
Can I prevent my money from going towards Lockhead Martin and the Military Industrial Complex?
On “Two Lesser Known Freedom of Speech Cases”
Also, I have friends who are hanging up their own shingle because of the tough legal market.
How should they find clients as new and independent lawyers?
"
Yes but that has to deal with disclosure of information. I don't see why it would prevent a doctor from putting up an ad on a subway for new patients.
"
I can see how that can work for immigration. It is somewhat presumptive that everyone is going to know someone who knows a lawyer.
Being born and raised in the upper-middle and professional classes, I can probably ask around for a whole range of services: law, medicine, a good cleaning person, a gardener, a carpenter, interior designer, tailor, etc. If someone grew up outside of those communities, I can see how it could be very hard to find a lawyer. We live in an era of mass-educational segregation and this does not benefit the poor or working classes.
"
Doesn't Sarah Palin represent that pro-Capitalist, anti-Elitist kind of right-wing populism?
The GOP has been drumming this beat for years. Possibly my entire life (and I am older than you), I don't see them have any policies that are actually pro-Capitalist while being anti-Elitist at the same time. I know the GOP likes to fancy themselves as the party of yeoman and small business but most of their policies seem to favor huge corporations and the powers that be.
False Conciousness comes to mind when viewing the Palin wing of the Republican Party. Their verbal claims do not match their policies or actions.
Then again, this is the kind of populism that would call an actress making 30,000 a year an elitist because she lives in New York and maybe went to Smith.
"
It doesn't change the reasoning for the original AVA ethics rules. One of the lawyer's who devised them at the begging of the 20th century was explicit in saying that they were designed to make it hard for "Russian Jew Boys" (and other minorities) to earn a living as lawyers.
This was in my ethics textbook. I can't find the citation on Google.
"
St. Mary's!
"
Now these are interesting cases. Do you have a free speech right to advertise a quasi-legal or illegal industry?
IIRC the Supreme Court refused to hear a case concerning brothel/escort advertisements in Clark County (home of Las Vegas). Prostitution is legal everywhere in Nevada but Clark County. The question was whether escorts and brothels could advertise in Clark County.
"
As I mentioned below, the bans on attorney advertising are often great for corporations but bad for individual clients.
How is someone supposed to find a plaintiff's firm to handle their employment discrimination or product liability case? Or a criminal defense lawyer to handle their burglary charge? Or an immigration lawyer to help prevent their deportation?
Yes some lawyers can be very imaginative with their advertisements but I want to hear a better way for individual and small-business clients to find a lawyer.
"
There was some discriminatory reasoning behind the ban's on attorney advertising.
Notice that most lawyers who advertise are in sections of law that are considered less than elite and serve a less than elite clientele: Personal Injury, Immigration, Divorce, Criminal Defense, etc. This is not white shoe law.
At one point, most of the lawyers who practiced these forms of law were non-WASPs who could not get into the Corporate firms. The bans against advertising were meant to keep the profession august and responsible by denying new hands a chance to compete.
I do not support prohibitions against lawyer and doctor advertising because it tends to be very pro-Corporate defense and very bad for individual clients who need to sue corporations.
Disclaimer: I'm a plaintiff's lawyer and my heart is with the plaintiff.
On “Raising Money”
Where do the chuggers come in on this scale? Somewhere between the last two options? One of the more annoying things about SF is that the weather is temperte enough for the chuggers to be out most of the year.
Also Movember (as much as I hate the portmandeau) is probably a more frequent variant than climb Everest.
On “Tragedy. Again.”
I am always surprised about how many people parent's did not drink in front of them while they were growing up.
My parents were always a glass or two of wine with supper types. This made me think of alcohol as something to drink with meals. Not a binge and party drink. I also got to have a little bit with shabbat. All in all, this turned me into a rather moderate drinker.
Our lack of public transportation is also a problem. Unless you live in a handful of cities, you need to take your car to go out.
On “How ACORN Stole the 2012 Election”
I think they knew it would be inconvenient and did not care. They wanted Marin to be a bit inaccessible.
I like it though. If I stay in the Bay Area and do the whole move to the suburbs thing, I think Mill Valley is a top choice.
"
Why did Herb Caen have to die on us?
The Chronicle is good for local entertainment and restaurant info and that is about it.
Though perhaps it is unfair to compare everything to the Times.
"
"So then, what’s the breaking point for Republicans? At what point do they realize that they’re losing to a guy who is better than their candidates? At what point do they acknowledge that maybe it’s Obama and not a complex series of churning conspiracies? Or does it simply never happen?"
I think it is going to get worse before it gets better. There is also the possibility of the Republican Party going the way of the dodo and being replaced by a center-right party and a far right party.
About a quarter of the electorate will always be far-right extremists of the current mode. Right now they can assert a lot of influence in the GOP. John Judis notes that the Club for Growth is already trying to stack the deck against reasonable conservatives for questioning Orthodoxies. In a system with multiple parties, this 25 percent would only control a handful of seats and that is it.
"
Is that really a nickname for the LA Times?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.