Paraguayan lawyer here. Paraguayan trademark law states that every trademark title is valid for a 10-year term, and then it has to be renewed, with a 6-month grace period for renewal. Otherwise the trademark expires and it has to be registered using the whole process (which can be long).
Apparently, Disney failed to register its trademark for a long time while [Paraguayan] Mickey dutifully did so, and also being careful not to overreach its trademark categories, things that helped it.
I've always wondered how all this mickey branded stuff exists since I got here, especially with major brands.
Do you have any insight into why so many signs are in English? I can understand maybe foreign brands, but local mom and pop stores have giant signs like "50% Off. #partytime" especially businesses where no one speaks english.
> Do you have any insight into why so many signs are in English? I can understand maybe foreign brands, but local mom and pop stores have giant signs like "50% Off. #partytime" especially businesses where no one speaks english.
That "casual English" is somewhat part of the language of the new generation. They're more like catchwords, because people don't really speak the language. People, especially young urban folks, use it to appear "cool".
> That "casual English" is somewhat part of the language of the new generation.
It's a near global lingua franca and the Internet has only accelerated that.
I wonder how long it will be until English just sort of becomes first language in non-native English speaking countries with the current trajectory and momentum of English-first Llama.
Shame it couldn't be a more cohesive spoken language.
Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking which results in different thoughts. Some thoughts are easier to have in one language than another. It takes all sorts to make a world and multiple languages means a broader mental space to explore ideas.
People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is. That is an inherently limiting philosophy which can only die out as it narrows the 'acceptable ideas' list over time.
It's pretty obvious to anyone who learns math or programming, that once you find the right vocabulary or equation for something, that your brain chunks it, and it's easier to reason about that domain moving forward.
Of course it's not like if you don't have the word "blue" you are color blind, it's just that it's really hard to have a conversation about 10 different shades of blue if you don't even have a word for it.
The strong version of Sapir Whorf is obviously false because everyone has perceptions and feelings that they can't put words to.
Getting tired of people replying to me about how it is obvious to anyone who speaks more than one language[1] when I’ve said already that I speak two languages.
[1] Which is more applicable than learning programming or math since this is linguistics.
I don't think it's even limited to written or spoken languages.
I've been learning a lot of CAD and mechanical principles lately, and I can tell that my brain has some sort of kinematic/movement language that is expanding, and helping me understand how things work, and how to build more things.
Exactly. Culture obviously influences thinking, language less so. Sapir-Whorf has been refuted, except for some minor minor areas (names of colours - some people call these two colours two different names, some call them the same - big deal!; left-right vs north-east-south-west; etc.)
no, that's just chomskists getting desperate. Polyglots can't be Sapir-Whorf denialists, and Internet is only broadening paths to be that, so support for UG theory must increasingly become irrational and negative.
I understand that polyglot means at least three languages most commonly, but I’m bilingual and haven’t experienced this effect. Would it come with my third language?
I'm a Japanese speaker with maybe above Japanese average but way below professional English and effectively nothing else except I've taken _a_ Chinese class, and it's currently obvious to me that UG theory is largely BS and most of the rest tautological, except I have no ability to succinctly point it out in a logical, academia accepted language.
There's been too many anecdotal cases I've had that aren't going to fit with the basic premise of UG theory that there's a hard-wired common human language engine with output stage that is language. Like they seem to have logical constructions that feels sound but aren't going to be linguistically valid in languages I know in Chinese, and there are of course phenomena of people's attitudes switching along with their languages, etc.
One counter example to UG theory I've come across recently is an easily understood phrase "verbalizing one's feelings": if UG theory holds some water, feeling == thoughts == language, or at least they should be close to each others, and we should be able to just `^C dump-sumerian<CR>` at any moment at zero cost, and we can't. Not that it takes unreasonable bandwidth or storage to do so but we can't. Doesn't that perhaps suggest that languages are both external yet natural to yourself as much as a keyboard is to a man?
Maybe it actually needs exposure to the third language so your subconscious can eliminate the possibility that you're just not good at the second one, I don't know, though I do believe multi(>=3) lingualism is sufficient condition.
UG means Universal Grammar? I guess you have me pegged as a Chomskyist because it makes sense to me. But I can’t understand you taking a Chinese class made you an embittered opponent of some advanced, nerdy linguistic theory. For my part I wouldn’t be able to understand it at a technical level.
>Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
Said by someone who only speaks one language? Nice Idiom: shame if something were to happen to it.
It is SO EASY to prove this (literally just talk to any multilingual and watch their entire personality shift when they change languages {some languages have larger gaps}, they themselves don't often notice the effect)!
>On the topic of languages at least.
At least, you say... hmmm... why does that raise ALL THE RED FLAGS...
> Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
which is why programmers keep inventing new languages (rust), which is the defacto standard everyone uses now. /s
Your arguments are as singularly cultured as what you argue for.... Which - as it so happens to be - (the quality of your arguments) is exactly my argument against such a future state.
And on one more note: Dave Ackley has some nifty ideas about the opposite of efficiency being robustness instead of waste. having a monoculture promises efficiency, but with that comes a brittleness that will cut us.
Depends on the country probably. In some places, at least reasonably high English fluency is near universal. It wouldn't be surprising if these countries eventually became effectively bilingual.
Yeah, the multi-lingual stuff isn't what I'm talking about. I'm referring to countries where English is spoken enough by this generation that it may just leak into a first language for their children or grandchildren.
If you’re a born in a Welsh speaking household English is of course technically not your fist language.
Yet by the time you’re an adult you’ll probably be indistinguishable from a native English speaker and likely use this as your primary language outside of your home. It really matters very little that English isn’t technically your “first” language in a situation like this.
Based on what? Again we’re just throwing eventualities out there with no basis in current reality.
People are pretty good at understanding English in Norway. But the only factor that introduces English into the conversation is when someone does not speak Norwegian. In my experience.
People are extrapolating from the fact that people use English-borrowed slang to these far-fetched scenarios. Yeah? Slang and words have always been borrowed. Not even medical doctors speak Latin to each other.
I never expected to be taken as declaring an objective fact; I just notice that this is already how workplaces are shaping up. I could easily be very wrong.
Anyway, with the internet the understanding of proximity changes. With an increasingly global economy everyone will be closer to people they only share english with. Or maybe mandarin, if you want me to emphasize skeptacism.
No offense, but sometimes an annoying aspects of monolingual people(those without substantial second language training, not just ** monolingualism totaritarianists) is that sometimes the only aspect of the concept of a language some of them understand is words.
About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
> That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said.
It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.
It's completely different thing: Ireland was a province loosing its language to metropoly. FWIW English wasn't even accepted as global lingua franca back then.
I have observed in dozens of countries that the youngest generation now speaks English quite fluently in most of the world. Boomers might know only a few phrases, many millennials can speak well enough, but quite a lot of teenagers now are speaking fluently, using slang and making jokes.
I've heard of kids becoming fluent in English before their mother tongue simply from exposure to subtitled TV and movies! It's usually countries where the market is too small to justify dubbing.
Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink."
The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.
The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
My mom was a German / English technical translator in the US. At one point she said those Germans need to decide, English or German. I guess the French from time to time make French words for those with English roots.
Though the German word for cell phone, “handy” is pretty great.
as a native german, speaking english fluently it drives me nuts. i mean, "handy" is not even borrowed like "computer" but invented by germans as a pseudo-anglicism.
But the English euphemism for "handy" would sure cause some confusion, and potential disappointment. Just like the 'merican slang "double fisted" takes a whole other meaning in the UK
Not only tech... I live close to the French border. My wife asked me to go to some criminal dinner event thing in France, and all the leaflets and the website were English. Great! Checking out the details, a small remark in a table with the dates and such catches my eye "Language: French". Well, maybe that's the French date,... Nope, that's for all scheduled events. Kthxbye. At least we were not surprised on site, because my French c'est no bene.
People spent more time reading your job offer if is explained in their own language. Less friction, more eyeball time, that is what you want if you are a recruiter.
Reminds me off all the "テイクアウトもOK" (Take out is also possible) mentions that flourished on restaurants in Japan during covid. There was already a Japanese equivalent that existed (お持ち帰り) but I guess that was less fashionable.
Trademarks have categories, e.g. "grocery store", "consumer electronics", etc.; that's what the GP's "also being careful not to overreach its trademark categories" refers to. If they tried to register the trademark for cartoons or animation, they'd likely lose it under some prior preference law.
(I don't know that law, I have no clue about Paraguay's legal system, but most trademark systems have something that allows a prior/established user to kill "aggressive" trademarks. But Disney is not an established grocery store, that's the crux of this.)
> Trademarks have categories, e.g. "grocery store", "consumer electronics", etc.; that's what the GP's "also being careful not to overreach its trademark categories" refers to. If they tried to register the trademark for cartoons or animation, they'd likely lose it under some prior preference law.
My experience when involved in product naming was that lawyers tend to very conservative about such things but, yes, in theory if you're clearly an unrelated category you can reuse an existing trademark. Historically, the purpose of trademark was essentially consumer protection to avoid confusion about who made something. It's actually quite different from copyright in that regard.
Famously, Apple the computer company has been sued by Apple the music company many times since its founding, usually when Apple Inc. adds or releases new music-related features.
you'd think an article nominally about 'intellectual property' would mention that mickey mouse is out of copyright now, at least in countries that apply the rule of the shorter term
It's still a trademark for perpetuity. Copyright expiration on specific films doesn't change that. This is why Disney started using the pie-eyed mickey more heavily in their marketing 10+ years ago to reinforce their trademark over that version of the character.
It's in trademark as long as Disney registers and renews the trademark in whatever country.
And trademark doesn't protect against any and all use in the same way copyright does -- only uses that might create consumer confusion with the trademark owner's uses.
Presumably, a company that has been selling grocery staples since 1935 with that logo isn't creating much confusion.
Arguably, Paraguayan Mickey has a better claim that modern do-everything Disney Mickey is infringing on its long-established trademark...
> Presumably, a company that has been selling grocery staples since 1935 with that logo isn't creating much confusion.
Yes, though their mascot might be? The article itself clearly states that the locals seem to associate the man-in-costume-mascot with going to Disneyland.
It’s not Mickey’s fault that a foreign company created a theme park with their corporate mascot 20 years later. Just one of those weird coincidences hahaha.
As the article says, the Paraguayan company has been filing and renewing the Mickey trademark, without challenge, since the 1950s. That's the reason Disney lost the suit.
copyright is subject to broad international recognition under a couple of very widespread treaties, and the pct provides a weaker way to obtain the same patent in a smaller set of countries, but trademark is an explicitly local thing. even in the usa, a trademark in one town may not be valid in the next (think 'jones's 24-hour laundry') and even registered trademarks are often only registered in the trademark office of one state. (every state has its own trademark office, in addition to the federal pto.) there is no trademark equivalent of the berne convention or the pct
so the idea of a paraguayan company, in paraguay, infringing a us trademark, is legal hogwash. mickey is a disney trademark in paraguay only to the extent that the paraguayan government decides to grant it to them, a decision that should be made on the basis of, among other things, existing uses by other companies. this is a fundamental and intentional feature of trademark law in every jurisdiction i am familiar with, not a bug
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to a significant extent trademark law is arbitrary in the same way traffic laws are. there's no objective reason, nothing justifiable according to some kind of natural law, that says you should drive on the left side of the road, or stop when the traffic light turns red rather than green. if everyone else is driving on the right side of the road, or stopping when their light turns green and your light turns red, that would be a better thing to do. the law in these cases is merely establishing a schelling point that allows a large society to coordinate their actions through more or less random but well-known decisions
the justification for trademark law is to protect consumers from inferior goods bearing the name of a reputable maker, but made by someone else. for this purpose it reserves particular names and logos for the exclusive use of particular makers. which particular names and logos are reserved for which particular makers is essentially arbitrary; what matters is that it be relatively consistent over time, so that consumers aren't buying good mickey-branded bread from the paraguayan mickey company one day and adulterated mickey-branded bread licensed by disney the next
(you can argue that to some extent modern trademark law is failing at this job, due to notorious cases of perfectly legal line extension fraud—such as exploding tempered-soda-lime-glass pyrex, saran-free saran wrap, pseudoephedrine-free sudafed, kaopectate without kaolin or pectin, and generic t-shirts bearing a designer's licensed brand—or the widespread phenomenon of private equity firms buying a quality brand and replacing its products with inferior replacements. but that's the justification for its existence)
I thought "pie-eyed" was specifically where there's a triangular "shine"/cutout from the black pupil, like a pie with one slice removed. Your first example has solid black eyes.
But the Mickey Mouse that is out of copyright is specifically the one you see in Steamboat Willie from 1928 (and maybe some of their other old movies with Mickey, I don’t remember what other movies Disney made early on around 1928).
Meanwhile the Mickey that is shown posing on top of a building in one of the photos looks like a more recent Mickey. (But I’m no Mickey expert.)
The copyright has expired for the Steamboat Willie short film and a few other things like certain comic strips featuring Mickey Mouse. To me that seems different than "mickey mouse is out of copyright now".
fortunately for you, jennifer jenkins, the director of the center for the study of the public domain at duke university's law school, has written a 6000-word explanation of the precise extent to which mickey mouse is or is not out of copyright now, including 21 footnotes which add further detail, which i linked in my comment above and will link again here now for your benefit
It's not. A character by that name from a 1928 animation is out of copyright. It is an entirely open question at what point a derivative work becomes a new stand-alone work and what that actually means for the copyright of the character by the same name with a different character design currently used by Disney as one of their brand characters.
Um, except that the article is about a trademark. Mickey (the Paraguayan company) isn't printing comics or producing cartoons, so how would copyright apply?
(as your linked article from duke.edu explicitly explains)
it's possible for a single thing to be subject to both trademark and copyright law, even in the usa; often the owners of the copyright and the trademark are different. this is how graphic designers get paid for designing corporate logos on spec, for example. see for example https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
> How do I copyright a name, title, slogan, or logo?
> Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks. Contact the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, TrademarkAssistanceCenter@uspto.gov or see Circular 33, for further information. However, copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship. In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark.
They're using Mickey Mouse (or their version of him), as a mascot. Doesn't that mean it's about a trademark?
The business in question literally has a mouse, named Mickey, that looks a lot like the trademark of Disney, on their packaging, their buildings, and their advertisements. They are literally using Disney's trademark.
They're an Australian fast-food chain, named so because Burger King was already a trademark owned by some small Australian store, and couldn't be used by the company that the rest of the world knows as Burger King.
U-Haul Australia is not associated with the American company at all. They just were able to register the trademark first, even using the original’s brand assets.
Also Taco Bell, which was absent here in Australia for many years, due to a long-running legal battle[1] with local chain Taco Bill. The first Taco Bell only opened in inner Sydney about 3 years ago (after decades of failed attempts).
> During a recent national holiday, the man inside the Mickey mascot costume was warming up in an air-conditioned metal container inside the company’s factory that serves as his office.
> Ms. Blasco asked The New York Times to withhold Mickey’s identity from the Paraguayan public to preserve some of the “magic” behind the mascot.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was complaining about the hypocrisy and double standards.
It's all well and good that they didn't doxx the guy in the costume. I'm just saying that they also should have respected Scott Alexander's wishes, which were arguably even more justified.
Here's a video about a favourite from my youth, kind of a Nordic parallel (though this one is about a duck, not a mouse) -- "How This Duck Outsmarted Disney's Lawyers":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5fNMBqCncg
Mickey was selling foods under that trademark in Paraguay since 1835. When did Disney start competing in that market segment with their Mickey Mouse brand?
Ack, yes, I meant 1935. I'm on mobile and typoed that in a way the spell checker couldn't catch...
Even now in the US I have yet to see Disney selling rice under the Mickey Mouse brand in a way that could be at all confused with the Mickey rice in Paraguay that I grew up with.
> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem
That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.
but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.
It just sounds like a way for people to try showing how smart they are while in reality it just adds confusion to completely irrelevant discussions, such as this one.
I think the campaign does opposite of what it says. Using 5 digits limits your dates to dates to a maximum of year 99999. While not giving a fuck, using the digits needed to represent a year, works for all years. No one is clamping their years to 4 digits when they say '2024', they are just using the necessary digits needed for that year
> a way for people to try showing how smart they are
given the choice between trying to demonstrate intelligence, and trying to demonstrate viciousness, i prefer the former. i guess your preference is different
Why start counting 02024 years ago then? is pretty much a small scale arbitrary starting point. Humans have existed for longer than that, they could say we are in the year 300000.
How does promotion by a single non-profit talking shop, however celebrated or intellectual were its founders, make it a "valid notation"?
Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.
To add some context as to why businesses wouldn't survive it, that war happened between 00001864 and 00001870, and wiped more than 00000050% of the male population (estimates vary).
Journalism is at least as much about providing entertainment as about 'problems'. And as far as entertainment goes, producing this article was a lot less effort than eg staging the Olympics.
Btw, generically talking about IP misses important distinctions here: this is an article about trademarks, not about copyright.
To give another example Brooks Brothers is a company founded in 1818, and I presume they still have their trademark. The trademark is not there to protect some creative achievement anyone had in 1818, but to help consumers not confuse the real Brooks Brothers with other people who make apparel.
(Whether you buy that justification or not is a different question. I'm just pointing out that trademark and copyright are two different beasts.
Another distinction: if you sit in your shed isolated from the outside world, and you produce a product to sell, generally whatever comes out of that process can't violate copyright---even if you produce exactly the same thing as an existing product)---but it can violate trademarks and patents. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
In much of the modern world copyright is granted automatically, but trademarks have to be registered and defended.)
I am very skeptical of the very idea patents, and somewhat skeptical of copyright, especially long terms. But trademarks are an entirely separate category, with entirely different trade-offs on a societal level. There are things to be skeptical about but indefinitely renewable terms ain't one of them.
>Journalism is at least as much about providing entertainment as about 'problems'.
I disagree and would call this public relations, not journalism which I do agree there should be a space for in media but it's not 'journalism' and I'm kind of tired of public relations being treated as news.
It's called aphasia, my brain just sometimes mixes up words as I'm typing and I don't catch it when I re-read my comments. My brain just fills in the gaps.
