Fritinancy

O Beautiful for Magazines

An Independence Day appreciation:

 

Window #1, Issues magazine shop, Oakland (my favorite neighborhood store)

Terrible photo; glorious tapestry of titles. Of course they all have websites, but it's so much more enthralling to gaze at all their covers this way. Some of my favorites:

Yaldah, A Magazine for Jewish Girls, by Jewish Girls. (Yaldah is Hebrew for "girl.")
Women & Guns, The World's First Firearms Publication for Women.
Skirmish, "the world's leading multi-period historical re-enactment and living history magazine."*
American Cheerleader (is there any other kind?). Note: You may want to put on sunglasses before viewing the website.
Nuts and Volts, "the magazine for the electronics hobbyist."

On the other side of the doorway:

Window #2, Issues

Highlights:

Primitive Archer (from the August/September issue: "Why I Hunt Primitve," by Billy Berger).
Buddhism Today ("Boundless Joy and Freedom").
Boar Hunter (online, check out the Tusker Tally Wild Boar Registry).
Cemetery Dance ("the World Fantasy Award-winning magazine of horror, dark mystery, and suspense").
Gastronomica, The Journal of Food and Culture.

What a great country, huh?

By the way, specialty magazines like these are at the heart of Charlie Haas's terrific new novel, The Enthusiast, which I highly recommend for your holiday-weekend reading.

__

* I love the word "skirmish." It comes from Old French "escaramouche" and is etymologically related to "scrimmage."

The Shady Side of the Tweet

TechCrunch reported this morning about an email conversation between Twitter and a third-party developer that had created a service very similar to Twitter's. One phrase raised TC's eyebrows—and mine:

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) [...]

I wasn't the only one who hadn't known that Twitter had trademarked "Tweet," but sure enough, a visit to the USPTO website reveals that Twitter, Inc., filed for protection of "Tweet" on April 16, 2009. (I can't link because the search will have expired; if you care to check, this "Tweet" is the ninth record in a list of 31.)

A few questions:

• Twitter, Inc., was founded in March 2006 and launched its service in July of that year. But it didn't file for trademark protection of "Twitter" until April 24, 2009. Why the long delay?

• Trademark protection of "Tweet" will not affect informal use of the term as a noun or verb (e.g., "Did you read Joe's tweet about that?"). But will it affect businesses that use "Tweet" in their names (e.g., Tweetdeck, Tweetie)?


• Twitter owes its phenomenal growth to third-party developers—to whom, it should be noted, Twitter has given open access to its API. Is this recent move a matter of biting the hand that feeds them, as trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy writes in a blog post?

(In an update to the TechCrunch post, Twitter founder Biz Stone explained, not unreasonably: "[W]e encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel. This approach leaves room for applications to evolve as they grow and it avoids potential confusion down the line")

By the way, the comments on the TechCrunch post reveal several common misunderstandings about trademark:

• "Can they trademark 'tweet'? Looks like an ordinary word to me." "Ordinary words" get trademark protection all the time: consider apple, dove, and twine. To be strong trademarks, they can't be used descriptively—you can't have Twine brand twine or Apple brand apples. But as metaphors or arbitrary marks, they're one of the pillars of brand naming.

• "Put a copyright on a dictionary word? Yeh." I think this commenter was saying something similar to the previous commenter, with a sarcastic twist. Two objections: "dictionary words" are turned into brands all the time; and the legal term is trademark, not copyright. Trademark protects goods or services; copyright protects a form of expression such as a musical or literary work. And patents protect inventions. (Here's a good summary from the USPTO.) By the way, the past tense of copyright is copyrighted, not "copywritten."

• "I’ve reserved around 100 domains with the term tweet in them ... although I didn't do a trademark search." You can't "reserve" domains; you either buy them (more accurately, rent them) or wish you'd bought them. And if you're starting a business—and from his subsequent comments, it's clear this person is—it's ill advised to stake a claim on a name without checking its trademark status. And yet I see it all the time. At the very least check the online trademark database; to be really safe (and well informed), have a trademark lawyer do a comprehensive review. Domains are cheap (and not as hard to find as some people think); trademark litigation is expensive. An ounce of prevention, etc.

UPDATE: Thanks, Karen, for leaving the comment about the Twitter blog post, which I hadn't yet read. As Twitter founder Biz Stone writes, it all comes down to likelihood of confusion. 

Don't Bogart the Dip

Got munchies?

Full of crunchy hempen goodness and ... uhhh ... I forget.

Hippie Chips are manufactured by Rock-n-Roll Gourmet ("For the Rocker in You!"), which was started by musicians Dean and Jan Ehrlich. Besides Sea of Love Salt, they're available in Haight AshBerry Jalapeño, Memphis Blue Barbeque, Lime Is on My Side Cracked Pepper, White Room Cheddar, Woodstock Ranch, and Chive-Talkin' Sour Cream.

Spotted at Berkeley Bowl Marketplace.

Guest Post at Duets Blog

I'm the guest blogger today at Duets Blog, a very fine collaborative blog that bridges the gap between brands and trademark, creativity and the law. Naturally, my subject is naming—specifically, the role a name plays as the title of a brand's story. Check out my post, and while you're there spend some time reading the many other interesting posts on topics as wide ranging as Michael Jackson ("The King of Pop's Most Recognizable Trademark?") and the trend toward single-letter naming in the hotel industry.

Thanks, Duets Blog, for the opportunity to share my thoughts on naming with your readers!

Eggcorns Caught in Love Nest!

Besides being a very naughty governor, South Carolina's Mark Sanford turns out to have a penchant for purple prose, as evidenced by his email correspondence with his Argentine inamorata. Here, from July 10, 2008, is one of the juicy bits:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!

I could ... but I won't. Such a coy lover, that Marco!

However, I was drawn to a more banal sentence in the same email. See if you can figure out why:

Tomorrow night back to Philadelphia for the start of the National Governor’s Conference through the weekend. Back to Columbia for Tuesday and then on Wednesday, as I think I had told you, taking the family to China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Thailand and then back through Hong Kong on world wind tour.

It was the last three words that blew me away: "world wind tour." This apparent conflation of "world tour" and "whirlwind tour" turns out to be not a Sanford original but a fairly common eggcorn: a mis-heard term that's assigned a creative spelling (and definition too, usually). The Eggcorn Database lists six citations of world wind for whirlwind, and they're probably just the tip of the cyclone.

For the record, a whirlwind is "a small rotating windstorm" or, metaphorically, "a confused rush." Adjectivally, as in a whirlwind romance, it means "fast-moving" or "tempestuous." One of the most famous whirlwinds appears in Hosea 8:7: "For they sow the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind."*

Eggcorns are usually created when words are learned by ear rather than by reading. But amazingly, some people are capable of getting it wrong even when they know (and see!) the source of the phrase. Here's reader SilverHawk confidently and erroneously answering a question submitted to The Phrase Finder in which whirlwind is spelled correctly ("I was just hoping to find out the origin and meaning of the saying which goes something like 'sow the wind; reap the whirlwind'"). SilverHawk's spelling and punctuation sic:

this is a biblical verse "those who sow the wind shall reap the worldwind" it means that that those to sow little seeds of evil (wind) shall eventually have to harvest the entire crop of damage (worldwind). simillar in meaning to "what goes around comes around." but with a warning that it comes back multiplied. it may seem insignificant at the time of sowing (e.g. gossip/rumour) but it can grow into a full blown worldwind which will eventually distroy all including the sowers.

NASA, by the way, has created a downloadable open-source tool called World Wind that "lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth." Perhaps Gov. Sanford should use this World Wind, from the comfort of his den, the next time he gets a whim to hike the Patagonian Trail.

___

* Source: Masoretic text of the Old Testament— i.e., translated directly from Hebrew.