Monday, February 03, 2014

The Future Source of Government Income?: LICENSING TAXES on Commercial Stealing of Words from the Common Weal

We continue to maintain that legislatures around the world should pass simple laws imposing draconian licensing fees on companies that are stealing OUR major "public" generic language words -- and the goodwill associated with them -- for nothing, while shamelessly suing others for allegedly imitating their far less important so-called "inventions", like rubber-band bounce-back patents granted by a clueless USPTO. The world is out of whack!

The Apple firm is one of the worst offenders on the planet on this score, stealing major public words like "retina" and "paper" from you and I as the public -- it is OUR language -- for base commercial purposes and not having to pay a penny for it.

See the newest fiasco at the New York Times in Makers of Paper App Ask Facebook to Change Its New App Name.

By law, we would force the Apple firm to be correctly renamed for its founders as Wozniak-Jobs, Inc. (or how about WOZJOI or even WOZJOIAPPLE, which would be a "new" invention and not a stolen name) and the word "apple" -- which belongs to the people -- would by law be returned to us, and, by the way, to its prominent place e.g. in the Bible, an ancient source of mankind's history having nothing to do with these digital monopolists.

The same is true for any number of commercial enterprises who steal OUR words for their private profit. Windows anyone? That's what we look through in our house. Reverse this terrible process of lexical stealing by which companies -- for NO compensation -- profit on the goodwill attached to words!

Let them name companies after their founders. The only reason that they do not do so is because they can steal the -- highly profitable -- goodwill attached to popular words and pay nothing.

This whole business of intellectual property rights is a pea-and-shell game against the common weal. Who reimburses THE PEOPLE for the words stolen from the general pool of language??!!

These commercial hawkers are stealing YOU, the public, blind, and you do not get it.