My "holiday dinner" was entirely mythical.
- The US doesn't have the only legal systems that matter to those in the arts (leaving aside the courts that do collections where the artists live…). Over across the Pond, artists of all kinds, in all the arts, need to pay attention to design infringement versus copyright infringment beyond the shape of their iPhones — and not just about the shape of their narrative, the shape of their canvas, or the shape of their jingtinglers. (Exhaustion comes from more than just reading a transferee's boilerplate "licensing agreement"!)
More importantly — and with implications for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys — an attempt to register a trademark in a dead author's name after expiration of all of that author's copyrights has been rightly refused. Such a registration would undermine the fundamental purpose of trademark and related theories: Prevent deception of end-users in the marketplace. Application to the ghostwriters of celebrity biographies and such (not excluding this tome ranging from trash to outright lies) is left as an exercise for… someone with standing to actually get into a federal court, outside the Second Circuit. And it might require a selective, but not too selective, presentation of evidence.
And, in some foreshadowing of what may come to pass in Florida, the European Union's top court rejected certain right-wing-government manipulations of Poland's courts as fundamentally incompatible with binding law. Although this sounds like it's something that only political operatives need to worry about, one might wonder about a hypothetical wrongful dismissal lawsuit by, say, Stephen Colbert, with "pretext" definitely stated somewhere in the pleadings.
And if you haven't guessed, the sources of several of the links above are both intentionally ironic and more subject than most to later "removal at the source."
- All of which is a lot less confusing than Erasmus — even Desiderius's most-famous work (that has been read by somewhere less than 1% of college graduates). Ah, the benefits of a classical education, during the Christmas season.
- It's definitely less confusing than figuring out who controls the contemporary gaming industry, especially during the wrap-up phase of Stranger Things (when it was so much simpler).
- Meanwhile, back in treehugger country, there's a proposal on the table for a state-imposed tax on actual, realized income above $1 million annually (and only the part above $1 million). As usually, some idiots are claiming that even just the proposal will result in tax-flight by the ultrarich (which doesn't explain why Uncle Jeff left for another jurisdiction a while back, does it?). Mostly, this would be good riddance. If, that is, it can overcome a nearly-century-old decision by the state's supreme court holding that an income tax is incompatible with the state constitution… on grounds that were suspect then and no longer considered legally tenable now (not to mention the unacknowledged conflicts of interest that would really expose the problems with an elected judiciary).