"Drove my Chevy to the levee..."? That's a lawsuit. "Pass the Courvoisier"? Yup. Lawsuit too. Artwork using Barbie Dolls? Lawsuit again... It's all part of the
Trademark Dilution Revision Act, which would eliminate the non-commercial "fair use" protections of trademarks in art, literature, and speech--
To amend the Trademark Act of 1946 with respect to dilution by blurring or tarnishment. It goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 16th, and there's a large roster of groups fighting it, including the American Library Association, EFF, and more, saying that consumers as well as artists would be preventing from exercising their free speech rights unless it's amended.
posted by amberglow
on Feb 3, 2006 -
35 comments
How Powerful Is Productivity? TCS interviews Former Carter Staffer (and Democrat) William Lewis, who makes some interesting remarks about worker productivity:
There were many disparaging comments made in the US and maybe even stronger abroad, (and especially in Japan) about how the US labor force was getting what it deserved because it was lazy, uneducated and maybe even dumb. And of course, the Japanese then showed -- the really capable, competent Japanese manufacturing companies -- showed that was wrong by coming here, building their own factories, managing American labor and taking a lot of other local inputs and coming within five percent of reproducing their home country productivity.
posted by Kwantsar
on Jun 20, 2005 -
11 comments
Three years after the day that claimed 658 employees,
Cantor Fitzgerald thrives. Controversial CEO
Howard Lutnick went from tragic figure to villain in a matter of days when he abruptly terminated the pay of deceased employees, but
Cantor has since paid $145 million to families in tribute to
former colleagues. Joining many others throughout the country in a movement called
One Day's Pay, the firm will donate 100% of Monday's revenues to the family relief fund.
-more-
posted by madamjujujive
on Sep 11, 2004 -
11 comments
The CEO with the biggest head in America (no, not Trump, I'm talking literally) is recruiting
secret agents. (You want spies with that?) Or, if you'd like a slightly less creepy way to get a lot of free really junky food, you can write
sauce packet slogans.
*The term "left-of-center" is NOT meant to be political in any way. Mmm-kay.
posted by wendell
on Jun 8, 2004 -
14 comments
VeriSign to Sell Network Solutions The
Registry business that is the backbone of the global .com and .net domain name infrastructure currently handles over 10 billion interactions per day,
remains with VeriSign as a critical component of its business. The customer-facing
Registrar business is the world's leading provider of domain name registrations, and an industry leader in value added services such as business email, websites, hosting and other web presence services.
The Registrar, which re-assumed the Network Solutions name in January of this year, constitutes the current Network Solutions business that is being sold. [emphasis added]
posted by quonsar
on Oct 16, 2003 -
14 comments
Brainwashed? Moi? Does this make you uncomfortable too? Imagine it was
The Wall Street Journal's or
The Daily Telegraph's logo stamped on your forehead instead of
The Guardian's. Or all three. We are what we read, but perhaps wide reading is a thing of the past. Beneath the po-mo jokiness, crude branding seems to have reached the normally label-resistant Left. This is particularly true in the case of
The Guardian, the indispensable journal of reference for British students and teachers. How many of us nowadays make a point of reading at least two politically divergent newspapers?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Feb 10, 2003 -
58 comments
Are Corporations Legally Persons? Orthodoxy has it the Supreme Court decided in 1886, in a case called Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were indeed legal persons. I express that view myself, in a recent book. So do many others. So do many law schools. We are all wrong.
Mr. Hartmann undertook instead a conscientious search. He finally found the contemporary casebook, published in 1886, blew the dust away, and read Santa Clara County in the original, so to speak. Nowhere in the formal, written decision of the Court did he find corporate personhood mentioned. Not a word. The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County.
Pardon me while I go to the bookstore. This looks to be a book well worth reading. Imagine the US government controlled by the best interests of real people instead of corporations.
posted by nofundy
on Dec 27, 2002 -
25 comments
At InfoSecuity 2002, an annual corporate security conference, new "computer forensics" software is on display, including software
"that allows corporate IT folks to research employees' criminal histories, credit information, financial asset details, friends and associates. "
The software is called
Red Alert 2.0, and more specifically the research software is an optional subscription based add-on called Intelligent Information Dossier plus. Isn't this tantamount to your employer spying on your private life, in real time?
As I work for a very large
military contractor myself, I could easily see something like this being used where I work. Would you feel comfortable working for a company that uses this sort of intrusive software?
posted by SweetJesus
on Dec 13, 2002 -
21 comments
Iraq Advice-Givers Have Business Ties This interesting information. I've done a lot of research on these folks and knew of many of these business ties already. But I doubt the general public has put them together. Yet considering how this information affects the slant of the many "printed statements" and
"op-ed" pieces by Baker,
Scowcroft et, al...why haven't any of the shrill talking heads on cable news revealed this?
posted by bas67
on Sep 2, 2002 -
19 comments
This explains everything! Mystified by the recent flurry of corporate meltdowns? Do you find yourself thinking: "Are those CEOs CRAZY?" Well maybe they are!
posted by BGM
on Aug 29, 2002 -
14 comments
J.K. Galbraith shocked at scale of corporate failures. "I can only say I hadn't expected to see this problem on anything like the magnitude of the last few months – the separation of ownership from management, the monopolisation of control by irresponsible personal money-makers." Myself and
chrispy came to the same conclusion on the drive home from the resolutely un- (rather than anti-) corporate
Glastonbury Festival today. Profit is valued and rewarded by the vast majority of corporations above all else. As a consquence, people with the same values dominate executive positions, to the exclusion of those with more 'humanitarian' or longer-term outlooks. Where is the balance? Should we make hippie non-exec directors compulsory? Or should I just go back to bed and let the drugs wear off???
posted by barnsoir
on Jul 1, 2002 -
9 comments
"To compile The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s, we used the most narrow and conservative of definitions -- corporations that have pled guilty or no contest to crimes and have been criminally fined." Just brimming with fascinating business lore, including "The FBI estimates that 19,000 Americans are murdered every year. Compare this to the 56,000 Americans who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestosis and the tens of thousands of other Americans who fall victim to the silent violence of pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer
products...."
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on May 31, 2002 -
39 comments
Reparations activists are going after corporations who may have had ties to or profited from the slave trade to seek financial compensation. "So far, the reparations legal team has publicly identified five companies it says have slave ties: insurers Aetna, New York Life and AIG and financial giants J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank and FleetBoston Financial Group." Of course, the article (or
the sidebar) doesn't cite anyone who may be
against the whole notion - which is possibly bias of
some sort, and seeing Johnnie Cochran
on the list of people involved doesn't exactly warm one's heart either. (
here are several other related "background" articles)
posted by owillis
on Feb 23, 2002 -
42 comments
Did Max Bickford get a v-chip implant? "...the FCC ruined television throughout the 1990s by allowing mega corporations and multinationals to gobble up TV networks and distribution outlets, including cable and satellite companies..."
Now that the big corporations own the content, they obviously have the right to change it. It's capitalism, pure and simple, but it may also mean bad TV. Does the goverment have the right, responsiblity, or obligation to to re-regulate the industry, just so the quality of programming improves?
posted by bingo
on Feb 15, 2002 -
14 comments
corporate totalitarianism and the ftaa: Activists will gather in Quebec City, Canada on April 11, 2001 to protest the upcoming Summit of the Americas (SOA) meeting. The purpose of the SOA, which will be held April 18-22, is to hammer out the first full text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a proposed agreement that would turn the entire Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) into the largest international trading bloc in history.
posted by kliuless
on Apr 10, 2001 -
3 comments
