[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/13/10, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
> Regarding trademarks:

>      There's an important tradition of defacing trademarks as a form of
>     Alinsky's political  jiujitsu, turning the trademark's strength around
>     and using it against a symbolic corporate target.

> I am not quite sure what this means in concrete terms.  Could you give
>  me a concrete example of something like this which is prohibited by
>  trademark law?

Well, I'm not sure myself how much of the "political jiujitsu" I
describe is prohibited by the letter of trademark law, and how much of
it is simply de facto prohibited by the willingness of corporations to
use SLAPP lawsuits as a weapon even in cases where the courts would
probably rule against them, simply because the defendant doesn't have
deep enough pockets to fight the issue.

But what I'm thinking of is the kinds of parody uses of trademarked
corporate imagery, the cultural monkey wrenching, that Naomi Klein
describes in No Logo.

>     I may be wrong about the effect of trademark law in constraining
>     freedom of physical production.  If it's only patent law, and not
>     trademark law, that makes it illegal to sell sneakers identical to
>     Nike's (I mean identical in the sense that the shoes are physically
>     identical in design and materials, but minus the Swoosh), then I stand
>     corrected.

> I don't know whether the precise form and coloring of a shoe is
>  covered by trademark law.  It would be interesting to find out for
>  certain.  But I am sure that you could make a sneaker that is very
>  similar in structure and manufacturing that would not infringe the
>  trademark.

Thanks for the clarification.  I wonder if it would be possible to
make a shoe with identical structure and materials, and specifically
market it as an anti-Nike at (say) 25% the price.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html