Rick Baudé Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>> How about calendars?
> Do you think that the patent rights to the
> calendar ended 70 years after the death of Julius
> Caesar? Not by a long shot, I found what looks
> like about a thousand or so patents on Calendars
> and all of them are some variation of the Julian
> calendar.
>
> > Considering that the present calendrical
> system is based upon the Gregorian calendar, your
> argument fails.
>
> Well at the risk of being disingenuous I had a
> feeling that if I said Gregorian, you'd say it was
> a Julian calendar. Or if I said Julian you'd say
> Gregorian. So I picked Julian since it had
> priority to the Gregorian. But yes I know all of
> this.

I suspect I am more aware of the history of calendars than you give me credit.

> At best, the Gregorian is a different
> > system from the Julian, and at worst, it is
> an improvement - which requires original thought
> by its creator. Yet, the concept of time
> reckoning in a calendrical system is not patentable: it's
> an abstraction and abstractions are not
> patentable (see below).
> >
> > Further, the Julian calendar is based upon
> the calendars of the Egyptians, via the
> Ptolemies. So even Julius Caesar didn't own the "rights" to
> his own calendar system, as the Egyptians had
> already conceived of the 365 day year and the leap
> year day before Julius Caesar came along.
> >
when I wrote:
> You surely don't think that you today receive
> your Snickers bar by Hero's machine (not Heron)
>
> Actually "Hero" and "Heron" seem to be fairly
> interchangeable in "Heroic/Heronic" studies.

Actually, it's not - one can speak of "hero" or the name "Hero", but no dictionary recognises its adjective as "heronic" - it's "heroic". The person Hero created vending machines, true; so they're either Hero's machines, which is probably the preferred way to express it, since he possessed/created them, or they're "Heroic" machines, which is probably a more confusing expression since "Heroic" has a totally different meaning in English vernacular. However, under no circumstances, is the adjectival term "Heron" (only in Italian does "Herone" have the adjective meaning pertaining to/of the person "Hero").

In fact, the main reference I found to associating "hero" with "heronic" was a treatise on poor reading skills, which said:

...Phonetically implausible substitutions included all other miscues that did not result in real words, such as omitting syllables or phonemes (e.g., imagative for imaginative, judical for judicial), adding syllables or phonemes (e.g. grugie for grudge,heronic for heroic), or substituting a phonetically implausible syllable or phoneme (e.g, permanate or permanent, traggady for tragedy)." Source: Patterns of Word Recognition Errors Among Adult Basic Education Native and Nonnative Speakers of English. A NCSALL Research Brief

> I prefer "Hero" since his name in the original Greek
> only had four letters in it, though I have a
> fifteenth century translation of his work into
> Italian where it's rendered "Herone". By the way
> while we're nitpicking here. IIRC In a previous
> post you said that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed
> their name to KFC because the state of Kentucky
> copyrighted the word "Kentucky" and KFC refused to
> pay the fee. That was an urban legend. But I
> decided to let it pass since your central point,
> that everybody's slapping copyrights on everything
> under the sun was right on the money.

Again, wrong. From Snopes Urban Legends Reference Pages:

...It sounded good, but the real reason behind the shift to KFC had nothing to do with healthy food or finicky consumers: it was about money — money that Kentucky Fried Chicken would have had to pay to continue using their original name. In 1990, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, mired in debt, took the unusual step of trademarking their name. Henceforth, anyone using the word "Kentucky" for business reasons — inside or outside of the state — would have to obtain permission and pay licensing fees to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. It was an unusual and brilliant scheme to alleviate government debt, but it was also one that alienated one of the most famous companies ever associated with Kentucky. The venerable Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, a mainstay of American culture since its first franchise opened in Salt Lake City in 1952, refused as a matter of principle to pay royalties on a name they had been using for four decades. After a year of fruitless negotiations with the Kentucky state government, Kentucky Fried Chicken — unwilling to submit to "such a terrible injustice" — threw in the towel and changed their name instead, timing the announcement to coincide with the introduction of new packaging and products to obscure the real reasons behind the altering of their corporate name.

Kentucky Fried Chicken were not the only ones who bravely refused to knuckle under. The name of the most famous horse race in North America, held every year at Churchill Downs, was changed from the "Kentucky Derby" to "The Run for the Roses" for similar reasons; many seed and nursery outfits that had previously offered Kentucky Bluegrass switched to a product known as "Shenendoah Bluegrass" instead; and Neil Diamond's song "Kentucky Woman" was dropped from radio playlists at his request, as the licensing fees he was obligated to pay the Commonwealth of Kentucky exceeded the peformance royalties he was receiving for the airplay.

Update: In November 2006, KFC and the State of Kentucky finally reached an undisclosed settlement over the former's use of the trademarked word "Kentucky," and the restaurant chain announced it would be resuming its former name of "Kentucky Fried Chicken." Source: CLAIM: The restaurant chain formerly known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" changed its name to KFC to eliminate the word "fried" from its title.

Next time perhaps you had better not claim I am promulgating urban myth until you have your facts straight.

> where "a lever which opened up a valve which let
> some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt
> with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at
> which point a counter-weight would snap the lever
> back up and turn off the valve," do you?
>
> No I don't. But I sure as hell, and I'm not
> joking, could see a patent attorney trying to
> overturn another patent because it uses this two
> thousand year old technology. I'm not a lawyer
> (nor do I play one on tv, like that other old joke
> goes) but like the old attorney's wheeze goes if
> you throw enough garbage on the wall something's
> going to stick. And I'll bet a lot of juries would
> go for it. If you were a patent attorney trying
> to overturn somebody elses patent would you let
> that one go? On the other hand if you were
> defending the patent would you fail to bring up
> Hero's original invention in your case to support
> your position that this was merely the latest
> twist on an invention with over 2K years of
> history behind it?

Let's take a real life example which is more on point of Hawass' claim. The Metropolitan Museum of Art [MMA] was allowed by the EAO (the predecessor to the present SCA) to make replicas of items in King Tutankhamun's tomb to sell during the 1975-1979 Tutankhamun exhibit. To do this, the MMA had to develop its own technology to make point by point replicas of specific items, with probably its crowning achievement being the replica of the goddess Selket from the canopic shrine of Tutankhamun (which is about 4 ft high). This the MMA sold for about $2500 USD in the 1970's - I recall that Kissinger had a copy, as did Rockefeller (governor of New York).

Now Hawass claims the MMA cannot make these replicas any more as Egypt "owns" the rights to the ancient imagery, but quite honestly, I don't think he has a leg to stand upon on such claims.

The MMA products are exact replicas, but the technique used to recreate them was copyrighted by the MMA and thus the product (the replicas) are also copyrighted to the MMA. As long as the MMA does not claim the replicas as the originals, which they would not do, I can't see any court (patents/trademarks and copyrights are usually determined by judge trial, not jury trials, BTW) upholding Hawass' claim of "ownership" to the design or items (since he personally did not create the items replicated), or limiting the intellectual property rights of the MMA over the methods and creation of these replicas. The MMA might decide not to continue the production of the replicas, in an effort to foster amity with the SCA, but legally they are on solid ground, IMO, to continue making replicas.

> I agree 100% but copyright and patent law, IMO is
> being used to choke off invention innovation and
> creativity NOT to foster it. For instance my all
> time favorite was when John Fogerty got sued for
> violating copyright law because he had the "look
> and feel" of John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater
> Revival. Another record comapny had bought CCR's
> and decided to throttle John Fogerty and sued him,
> the result, he didn't produce a thing for ten
> years. Ultimately it was overturned. But ten
> years? If I had been the judge that case would
> have lasted 10 seconds.

Again, this is not correct: Actually, Fogerty's feud was with longtime label owner Saul Zaentz, who owned Fantasy Records. Fogerty sued for the rights to his Creedence songs, but Fantasy owned them. Then in 1985, Zaentz sued Fogerty for defamation over the solo songs “Mr. Greed” and “Zanz Can’t Dance” and for copyright infringement, charging that the new song “Old Man Down the Road” copied Creedence’s “Run Through the Jungle.” Zaentz won the defamation case, but lost the copyright suit.

Fogerty won the copyright case by proving the two songs were wholly separate and distinct compositions. He brought his guitar to the witness stand and played excerpts from both songs, demonstrating that many songwriters (himself included) have distinctive styles that can make completely different compositions sound similar to the ear.

Later, John Fogerty sued Zaentz for the cost of defending himself against the copyright infringement case. Fogerty v. Zaentz became precedent when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings in 1993 and awarded attorneys' fees to Fogerty, without Fogerty having to show that Zaentz's original suit was frivolous.

See Fogerty Facts.

> > Further, since Hawass and the Egyptian government cannot claim they personally created pyramids or other ancient monuments in Egypt, any right to patent, copyright or trademark the ancient monument design would have expired after 15-25 years of creation, according to most countries' versions of intellectual property law. From the best of interpretations, their "design patent" expired millennia ago.
>> Further, pyramid structures are not unique to Egyptian culture alone, as New
> World pyramidal structures developed independently of the Egyptian style, as did Chinese pyramidal like structures.

> I tend to agree. However, I recall one design
> patent that was issued of a little mountain with a
> rock rolling away from the tomb of Jesus. So there
> might be some wiggle room in that.

I'm assuming you are speaking of replicas, or are you saying someone has recreated the entire mountain in which the tomb of Jesus was found? Either way, one might argue that since the resurrection of Christ, exemplified by the rock rolled away from the tomb, is part of the abstract tenet of faith, it can't be patented, but the product, i.e., a physical replica can be, since the techniques for its creation are patentable.

But Chinese and New World pyramids are not "replicas" - that concept arose independently in each culture, and without contact with the Egyptians (if you think there was such contact which led to all pyramids, welcome to the concept of hyperdiffusionism [the proposition that geographically isolated cultures developed because of 'outside influences' from Asia, Europe,Egypt, etc.]. Generally speaking, that proposition is not accepted in mainstream anthropology or archaeology.

<snip>
> All excellent questions. In closing. I agree with
> you 100%. I initially thought the idea was
> ludicrous. I have also seen in my lifetime how
> many utterly, ludicrous, completely bizarre ideas
> became reality. So bearing this in mind I thought
> it was premature to dismiss it out of hand. Which
> brought up my "devil's advocate" post. However,
> seeing how Hawass hasn't followed up with any
> other ideas, I think some copyright attorneys
> might have gotten hold of him. On the other hand
> maybe he just lost interest in it.

I think he often makes outrageous statements such as this to see if anyone will jump - and how high.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2008 05:56AM by Katherine Griffis-Greenberg.