On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Geoffrey Spear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm not sure I see a point to any trademarking at all. In the real > world, exclusivity rights to trademarks exist to prevent businesses > from confusing consumers by marketing goods and services that appear > to be marketing by another more reputable competitor.
Trademarks could be used as a mark of quality, though I don't think I actually know of anything whose quality we need to mark. Somebody will come up with something. Trademarks could also be used as trophies. If people didn't like trophies, they wouldn't be playing a game. > Forbidding > players from using a certain phrase to refer to a certain thing has > the opposite effect; it would make it hard to refer to things at all > if everyone needs to use an alternate name. Well, it's not like I could effectively trademark a common word or phrase, like "TTPF"; the trademark would be illegal (people generally use TTPF with a certain meaning to it). Maybe the implicit consent things should be strengthened to state that if one person can refer to a certain thing with a trademark, everyone can. > Also, if the first sentence of R754 serves any purpose at all (which > some people recently have been demanding that any sentence in the > rules must do; I'm waiting for someone to claim there's an implied > game action of moving around the map since the map's in the rules and > it must do something), this proposed rule would need to be at Power 3 > as it directly forbids the sort of regularity of communication that's > essential for the healthy function of the nomic. One disclaimer can allow the rest of the message to say whatever it wants. Perhaps the rule can be worded such that the only illegal uses of a trademark are things that can be considered falsehoods. --Warrigal
