Celery Man

more like jart

hahahaha

There’s a guitar for that - https://gettrumpguitars.com/products/donald-j-trump-gold-electric-guitar

btw on the soloing question I applaud the study and the ambition. I can tell you that you can play for decades without working that hard to understand the neck 😶

https://www.fender.com/en-US/squier-electric-guitars/stratocaster/fender-x-hello-kitty-white-stratocaster/0379102980.html

I don't think that that's right - I'm recognizing that we limit these types of protections in a lot of instance, as not-a-lawyer I assume that that is because doing so is beneficial to society. And then I'm saying that misappropriation of a brand is potentially very harmful to a business and does not benefit society in any way at all that i can think of. In the absence of a benefit to society, I don't understand why we would allow purely parasitic actors to harm a business. I'm sure examples could be brought forth that would make sense, although giving free reign to junk vendors to build businesses selling royalty free team gear isn't it imo. this makes sense to me if you're selling shit with old defunct company logo stuff. With song publishing, if I commercially release a song then anyone is able to make and release their own commercial recording of that same song. They have to pay a royalty but I can't say no. Unless they're trying to take that song and incorporate it into a different song, which is when I can say no - this is why you've never heard Bruce Springsteen sampled by hip hop artists. I wonder if there is any of that kind of protection here - can I take the Penn State logo and... well I was going to say mash it up with NAMBLA but that probably has some kind of free speech satire protection. Could I make a shirt with Joe Paterno wearing a MAGA hat and have it emblazoned with "NITTANY LIONS" and sell that? It is an interesting thought exercise. If I hadn't been a practicing alcoholic with rockstar ambitions through college (or maybe if I hadn't woken up with alcohol withdrawals on the day of the LSAT) I probably would have tried to pursue law. I was always amazed and curious about the kinds of patents that my previous company would try and pursue parallel to my work as a product manager. We're trying to slap a commercially available sensor in an industrial process and hook it up to a PLC to do some control and then display data about the process through a webpage - I would have to sit with lawyers while they try and draft a patent that says that nobody else can use that kind of meter to measure that kind of thing in that kind of process - what the fuck, isn't that the whole point of the meter? There are only two companies that make them, we're allowed to try and say that nobody else can use them in this industry? I assume that that is normal, although I also learned to suspect that there were a lot of idiosyncrasies about that as a result of it mostly being run by scientists in business positions.

I think this is part of my point (in addition to my assertion that it would cause consumer confusion in this world where many businesses/brands are pretty diversely commercialized) - allowing other people to take and improve some novel idea, or manufacture and sell more cheaply a product once it’s patent has expired - there’s at least some kind of benefit to that. I don’t see that being the case with allowing a business to co-opt another business’s brand. It’s not over the counter insulin or an improvement on the yeti cooler, it’s just slapping a yeti logo on something and hoping someone pays me for the yeti logo.

Yeah that makes sense, although I would assume there’s some lawyerly discourse about the feeling of fairness and how that might be a smoke test for concepts that are more cromulent in defining law. With insulin, if people weren’t allowed to fairly profit from their r&d, it would disincentivize the r&d work that creates new drugs, harming the public good - the “fairness” should be reasonably protected. Why would I ever give a fuck about someone trying to draft off of the work someone else has put into creating a brand? It’s parasitism, fuck’em. Is there a case where it would not be?

Not a lawyer, I don’t understand the reference, are you trying to tell me that brands aren’t people, with rights?

I mean, maybe fairness isn’t the goal or what matters legally, but with someone inventing insulin you have fairness vs good. How much do they need to profit for inventing insulin, which is fair, before the good of allowing people to benefit should outweigh the fairness of them profiting on their invention. With something completely ephemeral like a brand, there is literally no good - it’s only fairness.

IMO if someone wants to make money selling Trump branded garbage to his legion of rubes I think he should probably be able to wet his beak. For sure Hello Kitty would have some protection as artwork, but where is the line between that and the iconic longhorn logo? What about the Eddie Bauer trucks? I think in 2024 people assume a brand belongs to an entity and it’s use is protected and therefore blessed by the entity when it appears (temu aside).

If I saw a car with Patagonia branding on it I would absolutely assume that Patagonia approved. I for sure assume that the Eddie Bauer Fords of the late 90s were a collab. There are lots of cross brand collaborations, check out this guitar I just bought - Regardless of the intent of the law, it *feels* like you should be able to protect the use of a brand after you create it and make it commercially valuable.

I think the brand thing is why this doesn’t make sense to me - a brand is a thing. It has value, it has to be created in order to have that value. If I create a brand and do whatever it was that made the brand valuable, other people shouldn’t be able to harvest that value. And especially in cases (most of them) where the brand has reputational value and misusing it could damage that value. Patagonia is synonymous with durability and quality and environmental consciousness - what if I just took their brand and applied it to some completely different business making plastic garbage? OK? I’m not confusing their customers or harming Patagonia’s business?

So, in the example of the band that makes money on clothing as part of their core business - it seems like that is also part of the core business or at least a major part of the business of almost every sports team and organization. Can they protect their logo and branding in that use, and how would a university athletics department be different?

brb opening a storefront selling Donald Trump branded foam mattresses

What if we got bigger and started licensing out the clothes, and making more on performance royalties? what if I went out and started selling white t-shirts with the Ford logo on it, or.. Arnold&Porter or whatever?

So, I played in a band for a lot of years. We wrote and recorded music, which was ostensibly our business along with live performances. We’d get $500-$1k/night in our two main cities but we could only really play there once a month or two. We’d spend say 12 grand recording an album and another 3 on manufacturing a thousand or two copies of the CDs which we’d sell for $12, and I’m not going to do the math but it doesn’t work out. We sold t shirts that cost us a couple bucks to make for $15-20 and that’s how we actually paid for everything. Is the idea because we weren’t in the clothing business, someone else could just make shirts with our logo and name and whatever on them and sell them and keep all the money? I get why we don’t want people to just call dibs on everything but if you… create the value of a brand I don’t get why someone should be able to just take that and take your business?

At least when you were drinking you had an excuse.

does the licensing business run on something different than the concept of the trademark? I guess intelllectual property? Is brand not that, and are the words and slogans and logos and etc associated with the brand not... that? I guess, if the idea that trademark is meant to identify SOURCE OF GOODS means that it doesn't protect the value of the brand of an institution being applied to clothes and sold, then wouldn't that have enormous ramifications outside of the realm peddling t shirts for pederasts?

available now

to me that looks like a telecaster that a certain member of the paul butterfield blues band took a dremel to

Yeah I'm confused by that as well - what does it mean to be "in the clothing business"? My assumption is that every Longhorn I see on a piece of clothing sold... not on temu or whatever resulted in some licensing money going back to the school. My assumption is that that is a big business, and the revenue for the school is not insignificant. How is UT or Penn State not in the clothing business?

Jesus. That Mike Bloomfield had a keen eye for aesthetics when it came to his teles. Here's GE Smith with another one of them

I feel like I could get brisket to draft a will for me pro burrito if it included clause about having a tamale lady and tray of allsups chimichangas at my funeral

96 DM, my first guitar. I took it to the guy because the binding was coming up a bit and the previously repaired crack on the top looked like it needed some attention ^^ from forever ago when it was my office guitar, every now and then I’d have to spend an afternoon in the workroom that was an otherwise empty floor