Ω This story in Wired (Playboy Inc. suing Netscape for playboy link) is about something that when I talk about it makes me feel really eccentric and unimportant in my concerns. But I think it's central. So again.
The word "playboy" was already in the language. Hefner took it as the name of his magazine and from there his ownership of it grew with his empire. But it was there already.
And no one owned it.
The reason no one owned it is all the words in the language aren't owned until someone takes them, uses them enough, and makes enough money along with using them that a case could be made for their losing money if they can't privatize the word.
Which was originally free.
What's lost here, what no one seems to care about, is those words were not discovered in some ancient Egyptian tomb, they were not set down by Biblical scholars and hand-copied by monks in the Dark Ages. They were, each one, formed and spoken by individuals, and then reshaped and reformed as they were re-spoken by succeeding individuals, until they became part of the information commons that language is.
That original expression was first a poetic act, a creative act, and it produced a piece of intellectual property there was no claim for the rights to, as it was freely given.
Words like groovy, bitchin, rad, cool, neat, cherry - each had their moment of generational appropriation, they shifted and became something a little different than what they were to begin with, but they never became property. Every other word is like that too.
But then McDonald's is able to "own" that name, a name that was never associated with that company in a personal, legitimate way, but was adopted for its nuance of thrift, appropriated, some clan members might say stolen, from its rightful possessors.
We all get born blank slates, and accept the world as we find it as the world the way it is.
This buying and selling of things has taken deep hold of us, so that it seems to be the only way we have of being, but that's not true. It only seems like that because that's how it was when we got here.
The intellectual property of language has been commonly available, open-sourced and given by its originators, since the beginning of human speech.
You can see what I'm talking about if you watch the word playboy go from a word like any other to a word with an almost exclusively commercial meaning in the space of 50 years. It's like some great wilderness and these prospectors and loggers and miners come trooping in to stake their claims and "utilize" the resources. That no one owns.
Why can't the clan McDonald rise up and take back its own name? Because the return wouldn't offset the expense.
The word "playboy" was already in the language. Hefner took it as the name of his magazine and from there his ownership of it grew with his empire. But it was there already.
And no one owned it.
The reason no one owned it is all the words in the language aren't owned until someone takes them, uses them enough, and makes enough money along with using them that a case could be made for their losing money if they can't privatize the word.
Which was originally free.
What's lost here, what no one seems to care about, is those words were not discovered in some ancient Egyptian tomb, they were not set down by Biblical scholars and hand-copied by monks in the Dark Ages. They were, each one, formed and spoken by individuals, and then reshaped and reformed as they were re-spoken by succeeding individuals, until they became part of the information commons that language is.
That original expression was first a poetic act, a creative act, and it produced a piece of intellectual property there was no claim for the rights to, as it was freely given.
Words like groovy, bitchin, rad, cool, neat, cherry - each had their moment of generational appropriation, they shifted and became something a little different than what they were to begin with, but they never became property. Every other word is like that too.
But then McDonald's is able to "own" that name, a name that was never associated with that company in a personal, legitimate way, but was adopted for its nuance of thrift, appropriated, some clan members might say stolen, from its rightful possessors.
We all get born blank slates, and accept the world as we find it as the world the way it is.
This buying and selling of things has taken deep hold of us, so that it seems to be the only way we have of being, but that's not true. It only seems like that because that's how it was when we got here.
The intellectual property of language has been commonly available, open-sourced and given by its originators, since the beginning of human speech.
You can see what I'm talking about if you watch the word playboy go from a word like any other to a word with an almost exclusively commercial meaning in the space of 50 years. It's like some great wilderness and these prospectors and loggers and miners come trooping in to stake their claims and "utilize" the resources. That no one owns.
Why can't the clan McDonald rise up and take back its own name? Because the return wouldn't offset the expense.
