Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand | Hacker News Reader

Governor of Amazonas wants to charge Amazon royalties for use of the brand

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The governor should convince Google to build a data center there and paint it blue.

Then it can be the Google Azure Amazon data center.

It was a political move to shame Bezos into donating money to the state using some reasoning that would make headlines (like this one) and spread the awareness of the tactic.

Bezos, though, was smarter and did donated the money, but to the neighbor state of Pará (which also has the Amazon forest in its territory). So the public image blackmailing worked in a way, but the governor who did it did not get the money.

It’d be like New York suing someone with a business by the name of Nova Iorque”

Or some gal selling “Eu ♡ NI!” stickers.

Only if New York was a poor state in a poor country and the gal selling stickers was one of the biggest company in the world.

Nah, either they have a legal leg to stand on or they don't.

Now if Jeff and Co. had an issue with someone starting a company called 'A Amazonia', they defo would have a leg to stand on.

My initial comment was precisely to point out that this is not about being legal or not at all. It is a sort of “public image blackmailing”.

Next, Greece will charge Amazonas royalties for using their brand, since the Amazons were ancient Greek myths.

If Greece starts doing this, they can levy a tax on most things in the Western world!

Better yet, just a tiny 1-2% tax on any project, program or company that ever used anything Greek as a codename. Keeps you under the radar

Plus a usage tax on Greek-derived words!

and/or mathematical notation.

Oracle, Delphi, Minotaur, Ikarus, what else?

I feel like almost every European word has a Greek root deep down. Even the Latin ones sometimes come from Greek.

Alpha, Beta etc :)

Kerberos

I like that idea, but more because it would discourage oh-so-clever names for projects.

And anything in Beta

I think you just solved the financial issues for the entire Greek economy

Well yes but it cuts both ways. "Greece" (Ελλάδα - Hellada) is not a "Greek" (Ελληνικά - Hellonika) word. Sorry if I've screwed up the transliteration, its all Greek to me!

Whenever a Έλληνας (Hellonas - I think) uses the term Greek or other Anglicised word then we (whoever we are) could sue right back!

Modern Greek is just as close to old or classical Greek (and that's a PHD discussion) as modern English to German or Dutch (and that's another diss.) Throw in borrow words, pidgins, creoles and that and it gets complicated very quickly.

I won't deny that say, ichthphi ... (OK I searched, I can say it but not spell it) ... Ichthyophthirius is Greek derived and possibly one of the finest tongue-twisters known to man, casually thrashing physalis and the like. Closer to home, politics and other words derived from Greek (mostly an old version) are more familiar examples.

Language is always a tricksy thing. When I was a child I studied Latin, French, German and English. All to a greater or lesser extent. Now I'm 50+, I actually understand some of the interplay between them. That doesn't mean that I can speak German (bit sad - I lived in West Germany for some years) but I do understand why Wegburg and Waybury look suspiciously similar.

Nearly all languages these days are an amalgam. English is famous for "stealing" words but it isn't alone, by any means. Welsh borrows mercilessly from English for obvious reasons. However, what all languages have is some sort of cultural independence, be it accent, words, diacritics, alphabet, pronunciation or even sheer bloody mindedness.

> Ichthyophthirius

Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants

I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic.

This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words.

When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes: ph (fuh) and th (thuh). In Cyrillic I think you have a single letter: phi and theta (Greek) - I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

We can say fuh/thuh in a word as consecutive phonemes but it is rare.

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius".

Nah, closer to "ick-thee-off-thirius": https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/ichthyophthirius

> the surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Right, especially not having a vowel between them, because "f" -> "th" without an intervening vowel is very unusual in English.

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". That's very close in Russian (and other Slavic languages FWITW); if I were to transliterate Russian pronunciation it would be "ikh-tio-fte-rius".

> The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Interesting! I thought it would be the "ch-thy" part since "ch" usually sounds "t-sh"-ish in English, like "child".

I wonder if in English this phoneme uses the "k" sound only for words like "chrysanthemum" or "chrysalis" borrowed from Greek-ish languages.

> I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

Actually "ф" is just "ph" as in Philadelphia and "т" is "t", very close to how it sounds in the word "term". I think the key difference is that the "th" (sounds like in "the", "they", etc.) phoneme is a separate letter so it's decoupled from "t".

Including ChatGPT. I once asked it to choose a nickname and after a lot of attempting to block the request it said:

I'll choose the nickname "Athena" for ChatGPT. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and strategic thinking, which reflects the purpose and functionality of ChatGPT as an AI language model designed to provide information and assistance.

Funny how it didn't mention Athena is also the goddess of war...

Meta should be afraid.

Also India should own 50% of everyone's data as they invented the zero.

All software that uses /dev/zero will have to pay India royalties.

That patent expired.

They also invented the numbers and numbering systems in use so that should be way higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...

This is like when city of Batman in Turkey requested royalties from Warner Bros for using the name Batman.

Also, it's like when the country Iceland suing Iceland supermarkets chain, which is an ongoing dispute.

I think the Apache name is also an ongoing dispute by the Apache nation (the actual people) vs the Apache Software Foundation.

IIRC, it was named that for being a patchy system, though?

Yes, it was called A patchy server initially, and then that was made into a wordplay on the term Apache, and they used a colourful feather as a logo.

There is also sn interesting anecdote about Apache devs, IBM and open source.

Has the Apache Nation had a dispute with the ASF? Or just some activism group?

Not that it matters, really. The all-girls' Catholic school, Ursuline Academy of New Orleans, has a sorority system based on year of graduation. The classes/sororities were called Skips (Skipperettes), Macs (Merry Macs), Sioux, and Leps (Leprechauns). The school sought, and received, permission from the Sioux Nation to use the Sioux name. Despite this, after Black Lives Matter happened there was a nationwide reexamination of whiteness's impact on our culture, particularly with regard to cultural appropriation, and the decision was made to change the name of the Sioux class to Phoenixes (or Nix for short). So the Apache Software Foundation probably won't be named such for much longer.

The Iceland v Iceland Foods debacle was at least a bit more understandable- the country wasn't particularly happy with the trademark, but took the matter to court after the food company "sought in 2016 to prevent various Icelandic producers from using the word ‘Iceland’ to describe their goods."

https://trademarklawyermagazine.com/the-cold-never-bothered-...

From the Wikipedia, 'The dispute arose once more when the supermarket tried to stop the trademark "Inspired by Iceland" from being branded on Icelandic groceries in 2015.' That seems cheeky, to put it mildly…

Fortunately, it seems the country essentially won their case in December 2022 and the EU trademark has been cancelled. (“The monopolisation of a country name cannot lead to the inequitable situation in which traders with real and genuine connection to a certain geographic location are forced to constantly ‘look over their shoulder’ when referring to the real geographical origin of goods and service,” the summary documents say.)

As a Brazilian, I can testify that we’re all deeply ashamed of this stupidity.

It has even become a meme.

At least your guy is trying to make money instead of whatever our guys are doing <shrugs> Trying to see it as half full??

...to take money...

Our guys are trying to create money ex nihilo.

Money is always created out of nothing.

The governor even made a video [1]. A professionally produced video (which means expensive, obviously paid by the taxpayer) to convince (!?) Jeff Bezos.

What does he really expect? That Jeff will go "Yeah, you got me, I was waiting for this, here are some billions of dollars to you" ?

[1] (Note it's from one year ago) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYeYCqsD1hg

My last name is Geary, so I should get a royalty on every app that uses a gear-y icon for settings.

And Walter Bright certainly deserves a royalty on every brightness control!

I'm expecting your checks pronto!

I use dark mode on all my devices. Checkmate.

I think the GNOME project owns you some cash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_(e-mail_client)

Good ol' fashioned rent seeking. Why try to get money by creating value when you can skim money off people who do?

It would be nice if Amazon did something about the forest itself on the hand. I am personally saddened that the company is now top of mind for that name for probably most of humanity, despite the Amazon rainforest being the world's largest, is worth many billions and doesn't even support a massive rainforest-oriented conservation program. Same thought about brands benefiting from the aura of other non-persons including Red Bull (from the CITES-vulnerable krating/gaur, which has fewer than 1,000 individuals left in Thailand), Puma, Jaguar…

Indonesia should also get royalties for Java.

They should try.

My last name is "Grec", which is how you spell "Greek" in French.

Every Greek yogourt container in Canada (and France) has my name plastered all over it - surely I deserve some cash!

Slightly OT, but do you have Greek ancestry? It would be interesting if your last name was "Greek" in French because that was your family's distinguishing factor a long time ago.

The name originates in Poland (and I have a TON of distant family there). I know there are more than a few Grecs in France and around, so chances are there are some in Greece...

Does anyone in Amazonas use the word Amazon natively?

Don't most places have rules barring IP protection for the names of places? Like the US federal government can't sue "USA Super Nail Salon".

A sort of edge case is when Atlanta startup 'Beltline & Co' had to change their name because it conflicted with the Atlanta Beltline, a multiuse trail system encircling the central part of the city. The Beltline is certainly a place, but it only has a cohesive form due to the Beltline project being developed by Atlanta BeltLine Inc. and Atlanta BeltLine Partnership.

The Greek prime minister wants to have a word...

Well at least amazon has learned to start using nonsense upper case brand names going forward.

Maybe do something about the illegal mining and deforestation instead?

Brazilian here. Nobody takes this corrupt idiot seriously.

Has this ever worked?

Tillamook Creamery (Tillamook Oregon) has been legally aggressive for a while to make sure they have the exclusive on the name "Tillamook" in food related products.

Of course that's also the name of a town there, as well as the county it's in. That and it's the name of a local Native American tribe.

And they should

Pure nonsense.

Amazon.com Inc is feeding off the egregore of the Amazon rainforest. Its not a coincidence that the Rainforest retreats at the same pace Amazon.com's profits climb.

This has some merit, as Bezos might decide he can do a good work for Amazon as well as for The Amazon with a small selectable field where customers can donate a small fee, that in the aggregate, might be large enough to make a difference if it is wisely and properly directed to the indigenes that have been screwed over by the diseases and 'bad manglement' delivered by the conquistadores, heirs/occupiers and their wide range of diseases. This fee must not be given to the ruling politicians ='slush funded', but must be directed where it can do trye benefits.

Yeah man, a lot of people around the world, let's mention Dicaprio have never stepped foot in the amazon, i've never found anything about it.

Companies should stop raising flags about ESG and Amazon rainforest and not do something about it.

Why would he do that, precisely now? He has had plenty of opportunities to help in other quite worthy causes before.

He has reached a point where functional as well as factual acts of redemption are needed. We have seen how their system has created huge volumes of worthless 'garbage in motion' - by this I mean goods of such low value, coupled with low quality that neither buyer nor seller wants it. It is also low in density, so Amazon has burdened the ship-return ecology with unmanageable volumes of GIM that some Chinese online sellers are having ¬¬80% or more cancellations and returned good - that they lack the funds to credit the buyer with a refund at all = large numbers have folded their tents and fled. This Christmas season will see a shipper/seller/buyer crash = collapse. Honest shipper/seller supply chains will be burdened with tens of thousands of freight cars filled with melanges of all this stuff - all low value, not worth moving/sorting/delivering. Wait and see how Dec/Jan/Feb unfold.

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