The Slants Win Supreme Court Battle Over Band's Name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_trademark_...

That was compounded SCOTUS' rejection of the Redskins appeal, though this opinion should basically resolve the Redskins dispute anyway.

Yes, if N.W.A had been used as a precedent to support the Slants it would matter whether or not N.W.A. was written out. The more fundamental question of whether slurs should be protected is separate from the precedential question of whether slurs have been protected in the past.

Well, offensive to whom? There's obviously "Nigger"... But wait. It's offensive if a white person calls a black person that. But many a time, blacks will call each other that to 'own' the word and reclaim its power. So we have an immediate example of an offensive word that isn't offensive in many cases.

Or in recent years, simply asking "Are you a man or woman?" is offensive if they pull the 'not gender binary'-card. Yeah, we can ignore the fact that you either have sperm or eggs, or genetic anomalies that have interesting medical conditions.. But the question in certain groups is "Offensive".

Then there's the last group of people who are, what I call, professional victims. I've not seen a conservative one of these yet. They primarily are in the extremist liberal camps, and the smallest innocuous things will set them off in tirades. To them, everything they don't do is "Offensive". And this "Offensiveness" changes as per person. I usually treat these people by ignoring them. You cannot win. (An example of one of them is demanding to have others use some pronoun like hir or zir or zem. And they will get angry if you ask, don't ask, use a different one around other people or... )

Edit: I try for a variant of the Robustness Principle. Unless someone is intentionally mocking me, if they get some term wrong or use no longer "politically correct" terminology, I try to look past that for their underlying idea.

There are already many limitations on truly free speech, as there should be. Should this type of speech be limited? It's a valid question.

My main objection in this thread was to the specific statement: "This is a win for a free society." It implies that the defense was fighting against a "free society." I'm saying that two people can disagree on this specific matter while both being in support of a "free society." There's no need to polarize this issue in terms of free vs. non-free.

The trademark office interpreted the statute one way, the plaintiffs another way, it worked its way through the courts and the decision came down in the plaintiffs' favor, so the trademark office will change its interpretation. The system works.

There's no need to villainize the trademark office for disagreeing on the interpretation of a statute that hadn't yet been clarified by the courts.

There are lots of items that can be used to debate the for/against of the topic: Free Speech vs the government protecting hate speech, if protecting is the same as promoting, the role of government enforcement in commerce, etc. but I can't see "property".

In fact, unlike copyrights, the point of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion. It's not something granted to your for YOUR benefit, but rather for the benefit of consumers. Someone can trademark the same name in a different (but potentially related field) if there is no consumer confusion. Likewise, a trademark in an unrelated field can be denied or ruled invalid if it is shown that there IS consumer confusion. (example: Sleep Inns were original McSleep Inns, until McDonalds (the food manufacturer) shut that down. (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/19/us/mcsleep-loses-to-big-mc... - That article is thin, but my understanding is that McDonalds actually used polling to help prove that it was confusing, but that might have been a different case.). You can BENEFIT from this (by marketing your product to build a brand with a positive reputation), but a govt rule that benefits you is not the same as that rule being your property.

> If the government can arbitrarily chose which private property it will enforce, you open up the possibility of rife corruption.

I'd drop "arbitrarily" from this statement, as it seems a bit circular. The decisions aren't "arbitrary" - the line of what is and isn't "hate speech" is subjective and fuzzy, but almost all of the law boils down to a subjective fuzzy line (the "reasonable person" argument). Unless you're saying that corruption will MAKE it arbitrary, at which point it's not the arbitrariness that makes it potentially corrupt, but the corruption that could make it arbitrary. Drop the "arbitrarily" and I think the statement is fine, even agree with it (though I don't consider trademarks to be property).

I have a hard time with this because I can't see how the dots connect.

If government grants exclusive use of some term to me, that means you can no longer use the term in particular contexts. That's more stifling than having no protection, isn't it?

Or maybe it's just primed me to expect certain kinds of misunderstandings.