...everybody thinks the principles behind propaganda sound crazy and that that stuff couldn't possibly work on them....
I'm very sure it does work.
...and the people for whom it works want their workings protected from usurpers. And that's why trade dress was protected by the Landham act.
And that's why these things should not be protected. We should be doing our best to break this brain washing machine that exploits us subconsciously everyday.
Life is colorful, complex, messy, and overflowing with multi-faceted cues. I would not want a marketplace where brands could be distinguished based solely upon text set in Courier 12-point type. Branding by color, shape, or whatever is as much part of a product's DNA as are its name, specs, and performance. Get rid of these ways to assert brand identity, and we end up with a drab, Soviet-style marketplace where everything looks the same shade of dull, because making the effort to stake a branding claim will ultimately prove futile, and no one will bother.
Trademark law is basically enforced diversity which, despite its shortcomings, is better than no diversity.
Yes, I'm sure. I may be attracted by color and shape like everyone else, and while I might spend a few dollars when a neat gadget catches my eye, I do like to make sure I'm getting my money's worth. In spite of that though, do agree with Phil's post. Better to have an overabundance of shapes, colors, and choices than dull and limited ones. We just need to make better choices.
Life is colorful, complex, messy, and overflowing with multi-faceted cues. I would not want a marketplace where brands could be distinguished based solely upon text set in Courier 12-point type. Branding by color, shape, or whatever is as much part of a product's DNA as are its name, specs, and performance. Get rid of these ways to assert brand identity, and we end up with a drab, Soviet-style marketplace where everything looks the same shade of dull, because making the effort to stake a branding claim will ultimately prove futile, and no one will bother.
Trademakr law is basically enforced diversity which, despite its shortcomings, is better than no diversity.
I have sometime wondered how it would be if, for example, soft drinks by law all had to come in the same shape and size of bottle with the same format label indicating manufacturer and content. There they would be all lined up in uniform rows on the supermarket shelves. Advertising soft drinks would of course be banned as it is for cigarettes in much of he western world.
Would anybody even be tempted to buy that stuff? How much better off would the world be if they did not. Would there even be a coca-cola company?
In this world all multi-meters would be yellow!
Instead of that we have every product in the supermarket in a different size and shape of branded design container. Thousands of different little glass jars and so on. What a waste of resources.
Years ago I bought a Cable tester on EBay for about 40.00. It is a cheapo made in China but works very well, tells me at what distance a break is in a cable, which pair it is if it is CAT 5 or 6 and has a device that beeps at the remote end when properly connected. A friend of mine was shocked when he pulled out his $600.00 Fluke meter that not did half of the things my cheapo one did at a fraction of the cost. That was when I decided Fluke, although good quality, is highly over rated.
I have used fluke . I am not impressed .. I have used Extech for Years and they had things that I Need like a nice Backlit screen!in 2005 .
It does Freq count to 40 MHz!!! and duty cycle . It has a sweet screen . was 90 bucks tanks NORMAL fuses in the back ..
Its getting old( worn down ) so as soon as it gives up the ghost I have the new Agilent hand helds in mind as unlike boring fluke they offer Bluetooth I/O to my android phone or tablet and then do CSV datalogging with a FREE app .... can you say value added and its not like HP new face of Agilent is a cheap knockoff .
Meters start at 99 bucks and they ALL can take the 60 buck bluetooth module on the back .
Yes I am not joking Super fancy pricy Agilent is selling Real meters for Good fair prices . Good angle easy on the eyes Screens .
I hate to sound liike a HP shill but I am so sick of the lack of innovation from fluke and there outrageous prices for stuff that is really not any better then Extech or HP or amprobe .
From whatI read, they trademarked a meter, grey with yellow surrounds.
Typically atrademark is a logo, like "coke" and "coca-cola" and the "ribbon" on the label. They also trademarked their special bottle shape. Noone else had anything likethatbottle.
But Flukegot away with 2 colors, poorly described. Their is no case size, special shape, facilitiesor other apparently described.
Multimeters have been yellow for more than 30 years. Meters have asso been other colors too. Yellow rubber type sleeves have beenon some meters for 30+ years. A trademark must be original and new else it cannot be granted. Often a logo will be something destinctive and likely have a color scheme described by pantone colors.
Imagine if IBM trademarked the original PC as being housed in ametal box. Would that mean noone could make a PC in a metal box.
There needs to be some sense in all this fiasco. Trademarks and Patents are being grantedby persons who don't seem to understand what they are granting. Once granted, it's very expensive to fight or have overturned. Bigger companies are abusing these marks to block legitimate competition. And trolls are buying these up to extort money.
And anyone who thinks the government import inspectors just decided to police these is quite naive. It may not have been specifically against Sparkfun, but don'tthis was a random event. You only haveto look at how much effort Apple continually is putting tokeep Samsungs infringing products out.
Cluso, there are no government inspectors. This was almost certainly a private contractor with dozens or even hundreds of clients.
This also isn't trademark in the traditional sense going back to the 19th century; it's trade dress which was formally introduced by the Landham act and shored up by a number of court cases in the 1950's and 60's. The issue at hand is "confusingly similar," and it is not the confusion of a trained tech making a careful and informed choice but the confusion of a consumer making a snap decision based on impulse. The criterion is not nearly as vague as it sounds when described in text, because it's not about protecting a text description. (This is in direct contrast to patents, which are very exactly defined by text.)
The contractor who flagged the Sparkfun knockoffs was almost certainly going from a few sample pictures of Fluke's branded competing products. And for someone who has forgotten the name Fluke but does remember what "those quality meters the smart guys were using" looked like, the Sparkfun knockoff is a dead ringer. It's not just that it's yellow around grey, although those are necessary features; it's also that it was deliberately made to be "confusingly similar" to someone not well versed (as most of us here are) on Fluke's product.
Fluke is not really the kind of entity for which trade dress was instituted; they are probably acting on the advice of consultants who also do brand protection for much larger clients. It's much more about the choices you make in a store where you're confronted with a wall of similar products, and while you think you're weighing the merits to make a decision the fact is a lot of those weights were put in your head by advertising campaigns and chains of reputation (like the recommendation of those smart guys you ran into with their quality meters, what were they called again?) and trade dress is about making sure those weights stay where the money was spent to put them.
I wasn't aware of the concept of 'trade dress', but it certainly seems to allow big companies (don't have to be corporations, but mostly are) to dominate what is reaching the public.
Personally, I could care less that Coke has a red and white can and a special shaped bottle. I buy Coke for the flavor.
Somehow the advertising and marketing geniuses have decided that the human world population can be controlled like Pavlov's dog.
What I care about is how a new enterprise that might have a product of equal or better value can be pushed out of being available just because of appearance similarities that seem highly debatable.
These days Walt Disney has gone from having Mickey Mouse being a trademark to have an abstract partial image of one Mickey Mouse ear being yet another version of their trademark. The abstraction creates more means to intimidate others that even draws a circular mouse ear.... rather bizzare. Eventually, Disney might claim to own all round mouse ears. They have already managed to have the life of a copyright doubled because Mickey Mouse would already have fallen into public domain otherwise. And so we now have many books and songs (including Happy Birthday) that cannot be legally enjoyed with a royalty to someone far removed from the original enterprise or creator.
There are enterprises that thrive on having legal departments bully any and all competition out of the marketplace.
I do realize that trademarks were actually written into the original US Constitution as an important protection of business within the US. But when the few dominate the many other worthy enterprises... all within the US (rather absurdly by importing similar products made in China), it seems to have gotten far afield from what the trademark law was supposed to protect.
The lawyers are just having a field day with all the layers of history and interpretation, and the company with the biggest war chest is more than likely the winner.
Fluke may be an honorable enterprise led astray by consultants and all that. But the core issue is that the control of 'intellectual property' has become so driven by greed that it is killing off the economies that the concept was supposed to create.
they are probably acting on the advice of consultants who also do brand protection for much larger clients.
I know some people who have developed and sell IP protection and management software. This is big business, linked to and on par with the growing and very aggressive corporate security trend we've seen blossom since the mid-80's.
And it's not big clients anymore. The primary pitch made is a FUD one. Who knows where your IP goes? How do you manage great info walking out of the building, in heads and on storage media? What parts of the world need close watch? How do you own everything possible in your niche? What licensing agreements can be made to turn IP into additional revenue?
...and so on.
There are two distinct views on this. One is the open view where it's about value added, people competency, first mover advantage, etc... and that one says ideas are a dime a dozen and the real value is in the execution. This is most easily seen in the Silicon Valley startup type scene. They trade ideas and concepts around like nothing, and really that's a pool of resources they will use to build products, etc...
The other is very authoritarian, and it's also seen most easily in the startup world. That one is all about IP war chests, licensing, information management, etc... My favorite is the difficult problem of how to supply somebody enough info to service something, but not build it or reverse engineer it... Never mind that the physical product often serves the latter purpose. Design for IP protection means extending product life so service isn't needed, or making it a throw away, etc... and where it is serviceable, only some potential service is planned for, due to the IP concerns.
Ever see the whole sales process? There is the funnel, and at the top are prospects, lower down qualified ones, lower down still are those moving through the sales process officially, and out the bottom is new business, right? Well, there is now a similar IP type funnel. Any new ideas get documented, owned, tracked, managed. Below that are concepts and potential applicability. Below that are licenses and products. Below that is delivered, revenue generating IP.
That is what is going on, and it's not just big business anymore. It's everybody from a single person running an IP farm, to big companies like 3M, who have been early adopters of this stuff, security, IP, etc... from long ago.
The basic fear is theft of IP. Really, the right word is infringement, but that's a discussion for another day. IP gets out, and it ends up somewhere unauthorized... The other basic fear turns out to be leaving money on the table. IP exists, but isn't communicated to the right people, licensed, and profitable.
The former is driving corporate security. The latter is driving a big business of understanding what IP is in use, where, how, and who and for what. Lots of big data, people watching things like this incident, and publishing of things in specific ways to alert others as to both the ownership and the willingness to license, make money, etc...
Running counter to all of that is open IP. Creative commons, Open Source software, Open Hardware, etc... and those movements aren't just liberal type feel good things. (and I'm using "liberal" there as a means to communicate the warm fuzzy, let's get along and work together idea, not to start any politics) They are growing increasingly necessary for people to actually innovate in some meaningful way.
Where a closed effort may run into an IP snag, the answer is licensing, legal, etc... Expensive in terms of dollars. Where an open effort runs into the same, the answer is more innovation, work arounds, etc... expensive in terms of people and time.
Have fun kids! It's an increasingly ugly world out there.
"Intellectual Property" - Always struck me as a contradiction in terms. Intellectuals get the most fun out of life by sharing and discussing ideas.
The general concept is that if you have invested a lot of time, effort and money into having an idea and developing it then it's not fair if someone else takes that idea and churns it out by the million in their factories thus depriving you of any potential income from the work you have put in.
But what if there were no such protections? It would suck to be you the developer but possibly, maybe, for the greater good of the world at large it's cheaper, more efficient and quicker to have the big guy take your IP and make it available to every one cheaply. And it would be cheap because if he charged too much others would also have the IP and run with it.
Think I crazy? Sometimes busting a system like that is the way to go. Remember how the fledgeling USA ignored British copyright and patent laws back in the day? See how quickly things developed as a result.
Perhaps it's a shame the USA matured and grew up and put exactly the same old colonial rules back in place for itself.
The copyright is for a 'work of art'.
The trademark is an identification of product origin.
Patent is a bit more awkward for me to describe... maybe the discovery of a new unique application.
Personally, I see the color and shape of a product as fitting more into the 'work of art' category.
In the past 3 or 4 decades, all this has gotten more and more murky as the vast sums made with intellectual property have tended to provide a huge windfall to law offices that attempt to stretch the interpretations of each of these in directions favorable to paying clients.
And some clients will always be greed and unrealistic in their expectations, but have lots of ready cash.
I keep reverting to the belief that these protections should allow for new small businesses to take hold, not so much as allow large ventures dominate via having more money to spend. If feel that was the original Sintent of putting these features in the US constitution, but that we have gone astray.
Let Fluke and other big enterprises compete on realistic value. Having a protected turf for a nearly $300USD multimeter when a $50 one can do the job seems to be a distortion that is inflationary.
Does Fluke even sell anything competitive with what students and hobbyist might desire as a first time purchase? I see a Fluke 77 on Amazon has a list price of about $400, and a Fluke 179 for about $380.
I don't need a Ferrai, a Maseratti, or a Lamborgini to go to the grocery store. If Fluke wants to be known as a similar high-end product, the should expect their market to be a smaller share.
Teaching kids that they must have the best, most expensive devices, to begin to learn anything is just teaching them to become lousy money managers.
Fluke does seem to have some multimeters as low at $110 USD or so. But there are many that are far cheaper.
Comments
Trademark law is basically enforced diversity which, despite its shortcomings, is better than no diversity.
-Phil
Yes, I'm sure. I may be attracted by color and shape like everyone else, and while I might spend a few dollars when a neat gadget catches my eye, I do like to make sure I'm getting my money's worth. In spite of that though, do agree with Phil's post. Better to have an overabundance of shapes, colors, and choices than dull and limited ones. We just need to make better choices.
I have sometime wondered how it would be if, for example, soft drinks by law all had to come in the same shape and size of bottle with the same format label indicating manufacturer and content. There they would be all lined up in uniform rows on the supermarket shelves. Advertising soft drinks would of course be banned as it is for cigarettes in much of he western world.
Would anybody even be tempted to buy that stuff? How much better off would the world be if they did not. Would there even be a coca-cola company?
In this world all multi-meters would be yellow!
Instead of that we have every product in the supermarket in a different size and shape of branded design container. Thousands of different little glass jars and so on. What a waste of resources.
I have used fluke . I am not impressed .. I have used Extech for Years and they had things that I Need like a nice Backlit screen!in 2005 .
It does Freq count to 40 MHz!!! and duty cycle . It has a sweet screen . was 90 bucks tanks NORMAL fuses in the back ..
Its getting old( worn down ) so as soon as it gives up the ghost I have the new Agilent hand helds in mind as unlike boring fluke they offer Bluetooth I/O to my android phone or tablet and then do CSV datalogging with a FREE app .... can you say value added and its not like HP new face of Agilent is a cheap knockoff .
https://www.home.agilent.com/upload/cmc_upload/ck/WC/images/Wireless.jpg LINK
and tell me a meter that can Speak to you ! .. can you say hands free! . * below is the link *
https://lh4.ggpht.com/m6wmuAVNKXNVoEpGKE_S4hYcBiTqk7nEZCEJLanZ9qeGEYZRitAp1BC4uwZZfhVZPFE=h900
Meters start at 99 bucks and they ALL can take the 60 buck bluetooth module on the back .
Yes I am not joking Super fancy pricy Agilent is selling Real meters for Good fair prices . Good angle easy on the eyes Screens .
I hate to sound liike a HP shill but I am so sick of the lack of innovation from fluke and there outrageous prices for stuff that is really not any better then Extech or HP or amprobe .
http://wireless.agilent.com/flash/hhorange/index.html
Peter ...
Typically atrademark is a logo, like "coke" and "coca-cola" and the "ribbon" on the label. They also trademarked their special bottle shape. Noone else had anything likethatbottle.
But Flukegot away with 2 colors, poorly described. Their is no case size, special shape, facilitiesor other apparently described.
Multimeters have been yellow for more than 30 years. Meters have asso been other colors too. Yellow rubber type sleeves have beenon some meters for 30+ years. A trademark must be original and new else it cannot be granted. Often a logo will be something destinctive and likely have a color scheme described by pantone colors.
Imagine if IBM trademarked the original PC as being housed in ametal box. Would that mean noone could make a PC in a metal box.
There needs to be some sense in all this fiasco. Trademarks and Patents are being grantedby persons who don't seem to understand what they are granting. Once granted, it's very expensive to fight or have overturned. Bigger companies are abusing these marks to block legitimate competition. And trolls are buying these up to extort money.
And anyone who thinks the government import inspectors just decided to police these is quite naive. It may not have been specifically against Sparkfun, but don'tthis was a random event. You only haveto look at how much effort Apple continually is putting tokeep Samsungs infringing products out.
This also isn't trademark in the traditional sense going back to the 19th century; it's trade dress which was formally introduced by the Landham act and shored up by a number of court cases in the 1950's and 60's. The issue at hand is "confusingly similar," and it is not the confusion of a trained tech making a careful and informed choice but the confusion of a consumer making a snap decision based on impulse. The criterion is not nearly as vague as it sounds when described in text, because it's not about protecting a text description. (This is in direct contrast to patents, which are very exactly defined by text.)
The contractor who flagged the Sparkfun knockoffs was almost certainly going from a few sample pictures of Fluke's branded competing products. And for someone who has forgotten the name Fluke but does remember what "those quality meters the smart guys were using" looked like, the Sparkfun knockoff is a dead ringer. It's not just that it's yellow around grey, although those are necessary features; it's also that it was deliberately made to be "confusingly similar" to someone not well versed (as most of us here are) on Fluke's product.
Fluke is not really the kind of entity for which trade dress was instituted; they are probably acting on the advice of consultants who also do brand protection for much larger clients. It's much more about the choices you make in a store where you're confronted with a wall of similar products, and while you think you're weighing the merits to make a decision the fact is a lot of those weights were put in your head by advertising campaigns and chains of reputation (like the recommendation of those smart guys you ran into with their quality meters, what were they called again?) and trade dress is about making sure those weights stay where the money was spent to put them.
Personally, I could care less that Coke has a red and white can and a special shaped bottle. I buy Coke for the flavor.
Somehow the advertising and marketing geniuses have decided that the human world population can be controlled like Pavlov's dog.
What I care about is how a new enterprise that might have a product of equal or better value can be pushed out of being available just because of appearance similarities that seem highly debatable.
These days Walt Disney has gone from having Mickey Mouse being a trademark to have an abstract partial image of one Mickey Mouse ear being yet another version of their trademark. The abstraction creates more means to intimidate others that even draws a circular mouse ear.... rather bizzare. Eventually, Disney might claim to own all round mouse ears. They have already managed to have the life of a copyright doubled because Mickey Mouse would already have fallen into public domain otherwise. And so we now have many books and songs (including Happy Birthday) that cannot be legally enjoyed with a royalty to someone far removed from the original enterprise or creator.
There are enterprises that thrive on having legal departments bully any and all competition out of the marketplace.
I do realize that trademarks were actually written into the original US Constitution as an important protection of business within the US. But when the few dominate the many other worthy enterprises... all within the US (rather absurdly by importing similar products made in China), it seems to have gotten far afield from what the trademark law was supposed to protect.
The lawyers are just having a field day with all the layers of history and interpretation, and the company with the biggest war chest is more than likely the winner.
Fluke may be an honorable enterprise led astray by consultants and all that. But the core issue is that the control of 'intellectual property' has become so driven by greed that it is killing off the economies that the concept was supposed to create.
I know some people who have developed and sell IP protection and management software. This is big business, linked to and on par with the growing and very aggressive corporate security trend we've seen blossom since the mid-80's.
And it's not big clients anymore. The primary pitch made is a FUD one. Who knows where your IP goes? How do you manage great info walking out of the building, in heads and on storage media? What parts of the world need close watch? How do you own everything possible in your niche? What licensing agreements can be made to turn IP into additional revenue?
...and so on.
There are two distinct views on this. One is the open view where it's about value added, people competency, first mover advantage, etc... and that one says ideas are a dime a dozen and the real value is in the execution. This is most easily seen in the Silicon Valley startup type scene. They trade ideas and concepts around like nothing, and really that's a pool of resources they will use to build products, etc...
The other is very authoritarian, and it's also seen most easily in the startup world. That one is all about IP war chests, licensing, information management, etc... My favorite is the difficult problem of how to supply somebody enough info to service something, but not build it or reverse engineer it... Never mind that the physical product often serves the latter purpose. Design for IP protection means extending product life so service isn't needed, or making it a throw away, etc... and where it is serviceable, only some potential service is planned for, due to the IP concerns.
Ever see the whole sales process? There is the funnel, and at the top are prospects, lower down qualified ones, lower down still are those moving through the sales process officially, and out the bottom is new business, right? Well, there is now a similar IP type funnel. Any new ideas get documented, owned, tracked, managed. Below that are concepts and potential applicability. Below that are licenses and products. Below that is delivered, revenue generating IP.
That is what is going on, and it's not just big business anymore. It's everybody from a single person running an IP farm, to big companies like 3M, who have been early adopters of this stuff, security, IP, etc... from long ago.
The basic fear is theft of IP. Really, the right word is infringement, but that's a discussion for another day. IP gets out, and it ends up somewhere unauthorized... The other basic fear turns out to be leaving money on the table. IP exists, but isn't communicated to the right people, licensed, and profitable.
The former is driving corporate security. The latter is driving a big business of understanding what IP is in use, where, how, and who and for what. Lots of big data, people watching things like this incident, and publishing of things in specific ways to alert others as to both the ownership and the willingness to license, make money, etc...
Running counter to all of that is open IP. Creative commons, Open Source software, Open Hardware, etc... and those movements aren't just liberal type feel good things. (and I'm using "liberal" there as a means to communicate the warm fuzzy, let's get along and work together idea, not to start any politics) They are growing increasingly necessary for people to actually innovate in some meaningful way.
Where a closed effort may run into an IP snag, the answer is licensing, legal, etc... Expensive in terms of dollars. Where an open effort runs into the same, the answer is more innovation, work arounds, etc... expensive in terms of people and time.
Have fun kids! It's an increasingly ugly world out there.
The general concept is that if you have invested a lot of time, effort and money into having an idea and developing it then it's not fair if someone else takes that idea and churns it out by the million in their factories thus depriving you of any potential income from the work you have put in.
But what if there were no such protections? It would suck to be you the developer but possibly, maybe, for the greater good of the world at large it's cheaper, more efficient and quicker to have the big guy take your IP and make it available to every one cheaply. And it would be cheap because if he charged too much others would also have the IP and run with it.
Think I crazy? Sometimes busting a system like that is the way to go. Remember how the fledgeling USA ignored British copyright and patent laws back in the day? See how quickly things developed as a result.
Perhaps it's a shame the USA matured and grew up and put exactly the same old colonial rules back in place for itself.
The trademark is an identification of product origin.
Patent is a bit more awkward for me to describe... maybe the discovery of a new unique application.
Personally, I see the color and shape of a product as fitting more into the 'work of art' category.
In the past 3 or 4 decades, all this has gotten more and more murky as the vast sums made with intellectual property have tended to provide a huge windfall to law offices that attempt to stretch the interpretations of each of these in directions favorable to paying clients.
And some clients will always be greed and unrealistic in their expectations, but have lots of ready cash.
I keep reverting to the belief that these protections should allow for new small businesses to take hold, not so much as allow large ventures dominate via having more money to spend. If feel that was the original Sintent of putting these features in the US constitution, but that we have gone astray.
Let Fluke and other big enterprises compete on realistic value. Having a protected turf for a nearly $300USD multimeter when a $50 one can do the job seems to be a distortion that is inflationary.
Does Fluke even sell anything competitive with what students and hobbyist might desire as a first time purchase? I see a Fluke 77 on Amazon has a list price of about $400, and a Fluke 179 for about $380.
I don't need a Ferrai, a Maseratti, or a Lamborgini to go to the grocery store. If Fluke wants to be known as a similar high-end product, the should expect their market to be a smaller share.
Teaching kids that they must have the best, most expensive devices, to begin to learn anything is just teaching them to become lousy money managers.
Fluke does seem to have some multimeters as low at $110 USD or so. But there are many that are far cheaper.