I'm in DC for a long weekend with family and may not post much.
It was interesting to arrive at National Airport, and be greeted by a display at the t-shirt store of a shirt that said something like, “I Love My Country, It's My Government I'm Afraid Of.”
It wasn't very pretty, but I was still tempted to buy it.
The New York Times has a story about a trademark lawsuit today that sounds as if it wants to be a law school exam, or maybe the background noise for a legal thriller.
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is suing the American Red Cross (ARC) for trademark violations. The chronology is a little complicated, but the lawsuit is very simple: J&J alleges that it has a deal with the ARC, in which J&J gets exclusive rights to commercial use of the red cross symbol on bandages and the like. That deal is over a hundred years old (the Rule Against Perpetuities, it seems, doesn't apply to licenses…). After observing this ban for a century, J&J alleges, few years ago the ARC suddenly licensed the mark to some makers of “humidifiers, medical examination gloves, nail clippers, combs and toothbrushes” and emergency supply kits. J&J says they tried to negotiate, offered mediation, to no avail.
The ARC says the lawsuit is immoral: a spokesman is quoted as the complaint is “obscene” and “simply so that J.& J. can make more money.” (Er, hello? Isn't that what corporations do?)
But in fact, honoring your agreements is a moral thing to do too, and the NYT article is strangely silent on the question of whether the ARC admits the agreement with J&J exists, or whether it has some claim that the even if it did exist the agreement is now invalid. To me, that's like the dog that didn't bark in the nighttime — if the ARC thought the agreement wasn't valid, wouldn't it say so?
Ironically, J&J's original claim on the red cross design mark probably stems from a quirk in trademark law: at least before the most recent amendments, trademark law was strictly national. In other words, just because someone held rights to a mark abroad gave them no advantage in claiming rights over that mark here unless they actually used it here. As a result, it was pretty common for Americans to go abroad, see a nice trademark, come home and start an unrelated business using the mark, then win a lawsuit when the original foreign company tried to come into the US market.
It looks, from this timeline I've constructed (corrections welcomed!) like J&J may have done just that:
1863: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is founded in Geneva, Switzerland, as a private humanitarian institution.
1887: The year J&J claim to have first used the mark in commerce in the USA.
1895: The ARC & JJ sign the deal that is the basis of the J&J suit today.
1900: ARC chartered by Congress for non-commercial purposes.
1906: J&J gets a federal registratrion for the red cross mark, citing 1887 as the date of first use
1910: ARC acknowledges there are some senior users of the mark (unclear if it named J&J, however)
1919: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) founded. As part of the many high-minded things said at this founding, the IFRC leaders suggest they won't cheapen the mark with mere commerce.
Incidentally, Marketplace Radio is doing a story on all this, and I may be part of it. The show airs at 6:30pm on the east coast on public radio stations. It will be on WAMU if you're looking for an internet stream.
Update: For non-trademark geeks, I should also perhaps explain that given the way trademark law works, if J&J didn't sue ARC and the companies that are branding goods based on its licenses, then J&J would risk losing control of its valuable mark. So the facts that J&J is a big, rich multinational, ARC is a humanitarian organization routinely mismanaged by Republicans, and the dollar value of the contracts is small (I heard $5 million), all these are pretty much irrelevant.
Firedoglake, Correspondence School, walks us through how to communicate with Congressfolk & Senators for maximum impact. Apparently, sending letters to DC, and the district office and making a phone call are likely to get you triple-counted sometimes.
An important lawyer who you would think has better things to do appends the following to an otherwise serious discussion:
In other Most Excellent news, this totally pwns your boring old Flash clock:
Redfin is another example of the Internet's destructive effect on low-value intermediation. It's an online brokerage service that kicks back 2/3 of the agent's 3% commission to the seller. (I suppose the buyer's agent still gets the usual 3%? Why?)
[[Update: There's a much different and no doubt better explanation of how this works in the first comment below.]]
So far Redfin is only available in Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC, but unless some states have Realtor-protective legislation banning kickbacks like this I think things like this should be everywhere soon.
Of course, it wouldn't shock me to learn we had a Realtor-protective law here in Florida, given the power of the Realtors. An example of their power is that the newspapers capitalize the “R”. They don't do that for “lawyers” or “attorneys”.
MSNBC.com does a real public service by publishing this State-by-state list of deficient or obsolete bridges. A deficient bridge is what it sounds like; obsolete means that while the bridge doesn't have major maintenance issues, the design isn't sufficient for modern traffic volumes.
Not surprisingly, the North-east, with the oldest infrastructure and a vicious freeze-thaw-heat cycle does worst overall, although the Midwest isn't doing great. Florida, being a fast-growth Sunbelt state has more troubles with “obsolete” bridges (is every bridge in Miami on that list?) than deficient ones.
Jotwell Blenderlaw