OK for Apple to Call Sagan 'Butt-Head Astronomer' (1994)
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They used his name without permission for a codename, he asked them to stop, so the changed the name to "Butt-Head Astronomer", in a way that everyone involved with the project knew it was a reference to him. I pictured a bunch of people with the emotional maturity of 15-year-olds when I saw that.
There's some additional context that makes me more sympathetic to Sagan here too. The "Carl Sagan"/"BHA" machine (Power Macintosh 7100) was introduced alongside two other machines whose codenames reference fraudulent/unproven science:
- The 6100 is "Piltdown Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_6100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
- The 8100 is "Cold Fusion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_8100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
At the time, I saaw Cold Fusion as an aspirational codename for the best of the first-gen PowerPC boxes.
Sagan's inclusion is still weird, though, as the others are things, not people.
According to the article, he did not ask, he had his attorneys send a letter demanding they stop using his name, which isn't quite the same. That's something you do after you did ask politely and were rejected and lost hope you can resolve such an issue amicably.
I am not saying the people working for Apple were right, or that their reaction was right, but Sagan does not look good to me either in his initial reaction.
Not necessarily. With famous people you won't get a polite note or phonecall. Your first and only contact will probably be their lawyer/agent who will stamp out a standard threatening letter. The actual flesh-and-blood person might not even know that the letter is being sent as the attorney/agent has power to initiate actions. Same too for huge corporations. Open up "Mickey Mouse Land" and your first contact from Disney will be a very scary demand letter delivered by a man in a very nice suit.
To me, it sounds like Carl Sagan is being a dick. It was an internal name, so who cares. It's kind of an honor. I don't really understand the cringe-inducing sainthood that the online tech/nerd community bestowed upon Carl Sagan over the past 30 years. I don't even think he did that much original research.
Dick move from a butt-head fruit.
Sure, Sagan probably shouldn't have sued a second time, it just triggers the Streisand Effect. But it's understandable why he was pissed off.
https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...
I think of it like trying to protect a trademark, it’s fair to try to protect somebody from using your name, especially when the usage doesn’t have anything to do with fair use.
A code name that you publicize with somebody’s name is using them as an unwilling participant in promoting your products.
Plenty of state secrets get leaked regularly, but you draw the line at funny internal product names?
Whether you are a fan of Sagan or not, I thing every person should have the right to chose if they want endorse a product or not.
That aside, wanting your name struck from a project, internal or not, is reasonable if someone has something against the business practices of a company. That's about the only, to me, valid reason for requesting the cessation. Doubling down with butt-head astronomer instead is pretty dickish, though.
If a parent named their kid “Carl Sagan” should another Carl be able to demand the parents change a child’s name? Completely ridiculous case and I’m glad the judge saw through the nonsense.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/01/25/kate.middleton.fa...
2011. "London -- Several Facebook users have had their profiles deleted from the social networking site because they share their name with a soon-to-be princess.
Kate Middleton, 33, from Melbourne, Australia, had her account shut down last week, after Facebook suspected her of pretending to be the fiancée of Britain's Prince William."
That is completely different from being compelled by law to not use a name.
But it’s not the court of law and I think we can all agree that Facebook’s actions are depressingly dystopian.
Because a reasonable factfinder could not conclude that "Butt-Head Astronomer" implied that Plaintiff was a less than able astronomer or that Plaintiff was legally wrong in asking Defendant to cease using Plaintiff's name, the only remaining assertion is the bare statement that Plaintiff is a "Butt-Head Astronomer." Clearly this phrase cannot rest on a core of objective evidence. Plaintiff does not suggest any other assertions of objective fact that could be reasonably implied from the phrase.
Based on an analysis of the factors identified in Unelko, the Court has no reason to conclude that the statement made by Defendant implies an assertion of objective fact. Milkovich, 497 U.S. at 21, 110 S. Ct. at 2707 . Therefore, the statement is protected under the First Amendment and cannot form the basis of a claim for libel.
INAL so hard for me to parse this, but does this mean that some elements of the lawsuit were allowed to progress?
That's kind of odd. What does the First Amendment have to do with libel law? Doesn't 1A constrain only the government from prohibiting or forcing speech?
A crude analogy, if you stab somebody, the crime is not the knife, it is the stabbing. No need to put a restriction on knives (although there's some but you get the idea).
Originally, libel was considered completely devoid of 1A protections. Most defamation laws even allowed you to sue for *truthful* statements. However, in the landmark case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan), the USSC reversed this and ruled that the 1st Amendment partially applied to libel and laws must be scoped as such.
That's unnecessary, but probably you need to retake such class.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, if anything, established new criteria intended to further protect the rights given by the 1st Ammendment; among those the so called malice standard that I referenced in my earlier comment.
They can't punish it either.
Very good point. The prejudice against military people is very real, especially in tech. I took my military service off my resume and unless directly asked about it I try to avoid disclosing it.
I was walking home one day, in uniform through a rural area, when i helped push a car out of a ditch. The lady driving seemed to recoil at me. But then her husband explained that i was not a hunter, that the camo was a uniform. She was vegan. She has seen me walking through the area in early mornings and thought i was scouting for deer.
https://www.justia.com/employment/employment-discrimination/...
"The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) prohibits employment discrimination based on an employee's past, present, or future military service. This federal law applies to anyone who performs duties in the "uniformed services," whether involuntarily or voluntarily."
"Unlike many of the other anti-discrimination statutes, which apply only to employers of a certain size, USERRA covers all employers in the United States, irrespective of size. Part-time or probationary employees receive as much protection as full-time employees under USERRA."
So yes. Soldiers are a protected class for purposes of discrimination. If people in your employ feel they need to hide thier military service, that is a serious liability that needs to be addressed asap.
I joined after 9/11 and watching live on TV while fellow humans had to choose whether they wanted to die from leaping out the window or die from fire and smoke inhalations. I wanted to help make sure that something like that never happened to my friends again. The idea of colonizing a foreign land never entered my thoughts.
At this point I think history has shown that nation building is a bad idea and doesn't work. I think we wasted a ton of money and blood (on all sides) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would have been better had we never gone at all.
Now all that said, I think it's terribly fallacious and prejudiced to assume what somebody's views are because they served in the military. The military is quite diverse. You'll find people with all sorts of viewpoints and all sorts of reasons for joining.
Afghanistan is arguably more complex, Iraq (2003) was pure imperialism.
Well, no, individual soldiers don't, as a rule, have any more influence in the decision to go to war than the average civilian.
That being said, neither is it the case that the imperialist urge is isolated to a closed decision-making cabal; the ideological bloc advocating war for overtly imperialist reasons included people in all walks of life. Military personnel were not especially innocent, any more than they were categorically guilty.
> Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries, for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power. While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government [1]
The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government. The original plan was for US troops to leave after a few years.
If you want to go to "Bush lied and really just wanted cheap oil" then go for it. I have no idea what Bush's "real" motives were. I'm no fan of Bush but I don't think he was Hitler. Anyway what I've said is what I and everyone else I talked to thought about the effort.
No, it wasn't; the war was conceived long before the WMD narrative (which did not come from the CIA) was concocted to justify it; both control of strategic resources and a regional powerbase as a lever to recast other regimes in the region to support the politico-economic vision of America as the metropolitan power were the motivations, as several of the architects of the war wrote openly in the years before the Bush Administration came into office. The architects of war in the administration initially sought to seize on blaming Iraq for 9/11 as the pretext for their preplanned war, raising it as early, IIRC, as while the attacks were still in progress.
But, for sake of conversation, assuming 100% accuracy on your part, it still seems really absurd to me to assume that the average military member was even aware of this conspiracy, let alone supporting it while simultaneously pretending that we thought we were building up a local democratic government.
It seems like you are specifically talking about political leaders at the very top. If that is true, then we're probably just talking past each other, and we probably agree more than we think.
You’d think past some age, people wise up to the nuance of the world.
Excerpt: THE PALE BLUE DOT OF EARTH Image: NASA
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
-CS
Stalin actual toyed with the concept of a totally volunteer army, one where volunteer soldiers would elect their officers and only participate in actions with which they agreed. It didn't go well. Such an army is next to useless in the real world.
Go look up the origin of the phrase "military industrial complex" and you'll see how horrified people "in the shoes" felt about the state of the military at the time.
As much as I respect Carl Sagan for his contributions to science (and promoting public knowledge of scientific concepts), he does sound like a butt-head.
I think Apple engineers were being butt-heads when they got annoyed at this and renamed the project "BHA".
But that should have been as far as Sagan went; suing for libel because someone calls you a "butt-head" is really foolish.
The last time I read his Wikipedia entry it mentioned that contemporaneous scientists felt he wasn't contributing much to the field despite his fame, but I think public outreach is immensely valuable in shaping the next generation of discoverers and policy makers.
https://historyforatheists.com/2017/07/the-destruction-of-th... https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1nqrl0/carl_sag...
Reminds me of all the people still mad about dodgeball in HS. Neil would have pummeled anyone in dodgeball and the nicest dude in person.
I try not to talk to public figures, most of them are only nice when in the context of what they are trying to sell. The rare exceptions deserve the praise they get.
I don't even know why I'm writing this......... it was years ago.
That doesn't excuse being nasty to somebody, though.
E.g. Zeus et al. are bad because of all the bad stuff they did.
Story: All the blue collar workers and engineers working on the project for 3 years using the Greek codename thought it was awesome and we’re going to put up a team poster with the image/codename when it was finally just finished.
One walk through by upper management canceled the poster because one of them was offended.
The internal codename for a project is not something to get worked up about. It was probably intended as a sort of tribute by whoever called it that.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when the judge said/wrote that...
I feel like the latter legally counteracts the former. For it to be his likeness, has has to admit that he is infact a "Butt-Head Astronomer". If you openly admit you are something, it's not libel?
One for the history books.