Recently in Intellectual Property Category

Cory Doctrow has written on BoingBoing about fabric that you can buy that comes with a license agreement. The license agreement states that anything made from the material cannot be sold commercially. It's silly, and it will only end up hurting the company in question, because crafters will not want to use the material in their products, or...crafters will just shrug and ignore the agreement, at which point, what as the company gained, except apparently some future grounds for a lawsuit, which will make them look silly if they actually do sue.

This is unfortunately nothing new. I know several crafters, and there have been different kinds of fabric that are "prohibited" from being used in commercial applications.

I understand that the fabric company is attempting to protect the pattern that is on the fabric, and somehow save their "intellectual property" but I believe they're taking it too far. As Cory points out, are we going to come to a point where you need to get a license agreement from your butcher when you buy a cut of meat because he has a special way of cutting the rib-eye that he wants to protect? Is your neighborhood plumber going to make you sign an NDA before he works on your house which prohibits you from examining his fix or from letting someone else touch it?

How far are we going to extend this notion of "property" to non-tangible items before we end up binding ourselves (literally and figuratively) in such a way that we can't make any forward progress as a culture?

Here is someone else's take on DC and Marvel jointly trademarking the word "Superhero".

He's taken to calling the characters of the Marvel and DC universi (?) "underwear perverts" instead of superhero. Sounds fine to me.

Marvel and DC can go fuck themselves. They don't own the word superhero, superheroes, super-hero, or any such combination of the words "super" and "hero". I love Marvel comics, but I'm not going to buy any more of their issues because they don't own superheroes, or the concept of superheroes, or the word "superhero".

That's like Starbucks coming along and saying "Hey, we own the words 'coffee delight'."

Superhero, superhero, superhero, superhero, and Stan Lee, Joe Quesada, and the rest of the staff at Marvel AND DC? Go suck on a supercock.