Paraguay Loves Mickey, the Cartoon Mouse. Disney Doesn't
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Apparently, Disney failed to register its trademark for a long time while [Paraguayan] Mickey dutifully did so, and also being careful not to overreach its trademark categories, things that helped it.
Do you have any insight into why so many signs are in English? I can understand maybe foreign brands, but local mom and pop stores have giant signs like "50% Off. #partytime" especially businesses where no one speaks english.
That "casual English" is somewhat part of the language of the new generation. They're more like catchwords, because people don't really speak the language. People, especially young urban folks, use it to appear "cool".
Also, back when tech meetups were more common, you would often have where the title and description were in English, and the talks in French.
It's a near global lingua franca and the Internet has only accelerated that.
I wonder how long it will be until English just sort of becomes first language in non-native English speaking countries with the current trajectory and momentum of English-first Llama.
Shame it couldn't be a more cohesive spoken language.
People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is. That is an inherently limiting philosophy which can only die out as it narrows the 'acceptable ideas' list over time.
Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
> People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is.
On the topic of languages at least.
Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
There's been too many anecdotal cases I've had that aren't going to fit with the basic premise of UG theory that there's a hard-wired common human language engine with output stage that is language. Like they seem to have logical constructions that feels sound but aren't going to be linguistically valid in languages I know in Chinese, and there are of course phenomena of people's attitudes switching along with their languages, etc.
One counter example to UG theory I've come across recently is an easily understood phrase "verbalizing one's feelings": if UG theory holds some water, feeling == thoughts == language, or at least they should be close to each others, and we should be able to just `^C dump-sumerian<CR>` at any moment at zero cost, and we can't. Not that it takes unreasonable bandwidth or storage to do so but we can't. Doesn't that perhaps suggest that languages are both external yet natural to yourself as much as a keyboard is to a man?
Maybe it actually needs exposure to the third language so your subconscious can eliminate the possibility that you're just not good at the second one, I don't know, though I do believe multi(>=3) lingualism is sufficient condition.
UG means Universal Grammar? I guess you have me pegged as a Chomskyist because it makes sense to me. But I can’t understand you taking a Chinese class made you an embittered opponent of some advanced, nerdy linguistic theory. For my part I wouldn’t be able to understand it at a technical level.
Said by someone who only speaks one language? Nice Idiom: shame if something were to happen to it.
It is SO EASY to prove this (literally just talk to any multilingual and watch their entire personality shift when they change languages {some languages have larger gaps}, they themselves don't often notice the effect)!
>On the topic of languages at least.
At least, you say... hmmm... why does that raise ALL THE RED FLAGS...
> Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
which is why programmers keep inventing new languages (rust), which is the defacto standard everyone uses now. /s
Your arguments are as singularly cultured as what you argue for.... Which - as it so happens to be - (the quality of your arguments) is exactly my argument against such a future state.
And on one more note: Dave Ackley has some nifty ideas about the opposite of efficiency being robustness instead of waste. having a monoculture promises efficiency, but with that comes a brittleness that will cut us.
Sorry, tone is very hard on the internet sometimes.
Any sass would be directed at mono-lingual-future dreamers.
It's pretty obvious to anyone who learns math or programming, that once you find the right vocabulary or equation for something, that your brain chunks it, and it's easier to reason about that domain moving forward.
Of course it's not like if you don't have the word "blue" you are color blind, it's just that it's really hard to have a conversation about 10 different shades of blue if you don't even have a word for it.
The strong version of Sapir Whorf is obviously false because everyone has perceptions and feelings that they can't put words to.
[1] Which is more applicable than learning programming or math since this is linguistics.
I've been learning a lot of CAD and mechanical principles lately, and I can tell that my brain has some sort of kinematic/movement language that is expanding, and helping me understand how things work, and how to build more things.
Kids becoming bilingual is a different thing. It’s sort of weird if that was what you were talking about.
It explicitly isn't. I'm talking about English becoming the first language in countries where the mother tongue is currently still the first language.
Yet by the time you’re an adult you’ll probably be indistinguishable from a native English speaker and likely use this as your primary language outside of your home. It really matters very little that English isn’t technically your “first” language in a situation like this.
People are pretty good at understanding English in Norway. But the only factor that introduces English into the conversation is when someone does not speak Norwegian. In my experience.
People are extrapolating from the fact that people use English-borrowed slang to these far-fetched scenarios. Yeah? Slang and words have always been borrowed. Not even medical doctors speak Latin to each other.
I never expected to be taken as declaring an objective fact; I just notice that this is already how workplaces are shaping up. I could easily be very wrong.
Anyway, with the internet the understanding of proximity changes. With an increasingly global economy everyone will be closer to people they only share english with. Or maybe mandarin, if you want me to emphasize skeptacism.
About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.
Ultimately you have to choose a language that everyone can express themselves in and it sure as hell ain't Dutch lmao.
Though the German word for cell phone, “handy” is pretty great.
But it sounds rather silly in the standard German pronounciation of "henndii".
The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.
The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
Needless to say, numerous Scots and Irish food businesses were not very impressed.
With Apple the computer company giving a huge payment to Apple the music company in exchange for all of their trademarks.
(I don't know that law, I have no clue about Paraguay's legal system, but most trademark systems have something that allows a prior/established user to kill "aggressive" trademarks. But Disney is not an established grocery store, that's the crux of this.)
That's indeed the case, imho.
Meanwhile the Mickey that is shown posing on top of a building in one of the photos looks like a more recent Mickey. (But I’m no Mickey expert.)
And it is important to keep that in mind.
And trademark doesn't protect against any and all use in the same way copyright does -- only uses that might create consumer confusion with the trademark owner's uses.
Presumably, a company that has been selling grocery staples since 1935 with that logo isn't creating much confusion.
Arguably, Paraguayan Mickey has a better claim that modern do-everything Disney Mickey is infringing on its long-established trademark...
Yes, though their mascot might be? The article itself clearly states that the locals seem to associate the man-in-costume-mascot with going to Disneyland.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Mickey_-_The_...
Compare to later versions, where the eyes are well defined:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f6/Mickey_-_Fant...
In recent years, Disney has been using the old version from Steamboat Willie at the start of movies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie
And even making new shorts with that style:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC6qIbU1olyXQe1WOKt8U...
While the art is similar, the animation is quite different (in a very bad way). They are also completely unfunny.
(* goes back to watch old hand-animated episodes of Tom&Jerry and Wile E. Coyote *)
Unless both the US and Paraguay have ratified a 100% automatic international trademark treaty, which seems unlikely.
so the idea of a paraguayan company, in paraguay, infringing a us trademark, is legal hogwash. mickey is a disney trademark in paraguay only to the extent that the paraguayan government decides to grant it to them, a decision that should be made on the basis of, among other things, existing uses by other companies. this is a fundamental and intentional feature of trademark law in every jurisdiction i am familiar with, not a bug
— ⁂ —
to a significant extent trademark law is arbitrary in the same way traffic laws are. there's no objective reason, nothing justifiable according to some kind of natural law, that says you should drive on the left side of the road, or stop when the traffic light turns red rather than green. if everyone else is driving on the right side of the road, or stopping when their light turns green and your light turns red, that would be a better thing to do. the law in these cases is merely establishing a schelling point that allows a large society to coordinate their actions through more or less random but well-known decisions
the justification for trademark law is to protect consumers from inferior goods bearing the name of a reputable maker, but made by someone else. for this purpose it reserves particular names and logos for the exclusive use of particular makers. which particular names and logos are reserved for which particular makers is essentially arbitrary; what matters is that it be relatively consistent over time, so that consumers aren't buying good mickey-branded bread from the paraguayan mickey company one day and adulterated mickey-branded bread licensed by disney the next
(you can argue that to some extent modern trademark law is failing at this job, due to notorious cases of perfectly legal line extension fraud—such as exploding tempered-soda-lime-glass pyrex, saran-free saran wrap, pseudoephedrine-free sudafed, kaopectate without kaolin or pectin, and generic t-shirts bearing a designer's licensed brand—or the widespread phenomenon of private equity firms buying a quality brand and replacing its products with inferior replacements. but that's the justification for its existence)
(as your linked article from duke.edu explicitly explains)
The business in question literally has a mouse, named Mickey, that looks a lot like the trademark of Disney, on their packaging, their buildings, and their advertisements. They are literally using Disney's trademark.
The article is about trademark, not copyright.
> How do I copyright a name, title, slogan, or logo?
> Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks. Contact the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, TrademarkAssistanceCenter@uspto.gov or see Circular 33, for further information. However, copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship. In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark.
see also https://www.quisenberrylaw.com/ip-discovery-blog/who-owns-th...
it seems clear that the paraguayan mickey company is the legitimate owner of the paraguayan trademark
Makes the term Paraguayan Mickey (or "Mickey paraguaio" as the Brasilians would call it) more interesting.
They're an Australian fast-food chain, named so because Burger King was already a trademark owned by some small Australian store, and couldn't be used by the company that the rest of the world knows as Burger King.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Jack%27s#:~:text=Hungry....
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/taco-bell-and-taco...
> During a recent national holiday, the man inside the Mickey mascot costume was warming up in an air-conditioned metal container inside the company’s factory that serves as his office.
> Ms. Blasco asked The New York Times to withhold Mickey’s identity from the Paraguayan public to preserve some of the “magic” behind the mascot.
Seems all reasonable, until you remember the flimsy justifications for their doxxing of Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex fame. See eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
It's all well and good that they didn't doxx the guy in the costume. I'm just saying that they also should have respected Scott Alexander's wishes, which were arguably even more justified.
Even now in the US I have yet to see Disney selling rice under the Mickey Mouse brand in a way that could be at all confused with the Mickey rice in Paraguay that I grew up with.
> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem
That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.
The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.
I think the campaign does opposite of what it says. Using 5 digits limits your dates to dates to a maximum of year 99999. While not giving a fuck, using the digits needed to represent a year, works for all years. No one is clamping their years to 4 digits when they say '2024', they are just using the necessary digits needed for that year
given the choice between trying to demonstrate intelligence, and trying to demonstrate viciousness, i prefer the former. i guess your preference is different
(As of A.D. MMXXIV)
Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.