[pp.int.general] trademarks

[Edison Carter]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 6:07 AM, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>    > The protection of the ROLEX name serves a purpose, even for consumers,
>    > because you may be cheated. When I bought my ROLEX in BKK for 10 euro,
>    > it was an honest transaction. But a dishonest vendor could have sold it
>    > to me for 1000 euro.
>    True. But why are you asking ROLEX to sue in your name against the
>    dishonest vendor?
>
> Rolex can afford to sue, and will find it worth while to do so.
> Customers won't -- even if they can afford it, it isn't important enough
> to them to spend that much time.

This is the trade-off.

People who want a genuine Rolex get some assurance under Trademark law
that when they buy a Rolex (anywhere other than from a street vendor
at least) there's a fairly good chance that it will be an actual
Rolex, with whatever assurance of quality and value that implies.

Rolex defend their trademark by suing dishonest vendors. They get some
value out of that, but they're also just as equally protecting
consumers from paying premium price for what they expect is going to
be a good quality watch, only to have it stop a month later.

Trademark law is in general a GOOD law. It has just as much value for
consumers as it has for manufacturers and sellers. We just need to
make sure that it stays reigned in so that this balance is maintained.


Copyright law in general is also not entirely bad law, insofar as it
provides a means for content creators to share the profits from
commercial publication. The problem is that Copyright law has already
got wildly out of hand. Copyright started out only limiting
'commercial' copying because there was no other sort of copying on any
scale, as personal, non-commercial copying became possible copyright
law should not have extended to restricting that. Also the length of
copyright is completely obscene, as copying, publishing and
distribution have become steadily cheaper and faster it seems logical
to me that we should see shorter and less encompassing copyright, but
instead we've gone in completely the opposite direction.