Category: Sports
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by Gordon Hull An important trademark and First Amendment case was decided in the Federal Circuit yesterday. In it, the Court ruled in favor of Simon Tam, who named his band “The Slants.” When he attempted to register the band name as a trademark, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected the mark as “disparaging,”…
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By: Samir Chopra Many philosophers refer to the game of cricket in their writings. Reading one of these references never fails to give me—a lifelong cricket fan—a little start of pleasure. Many years ago, as I began my graduate studies in philosophy in New York City, I stumbled upon JL Austin while reading on speech acts for…
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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property. The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.” This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a…
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My threadjacking attempt to play the Vonnegutian Martian anthropologist fell flat yesterday,* so I want to atone for the sin by seriously raising the question of why we watch sports. There are three kinds of answers to the question I can think of: (1) a Witggensteinian deconstruction of the question, (2) a phenomenological/aesthetic answer, and…
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Jonathan Martin – the player for the Miami Dolphins who left football, at least temporarily, as a result of relentless locker room bullying – has prompted some voluminous soul-searching. (Whether it leads to meaningful action remains to be seen.) I want to suggest that there have been two profoundly wrong assumptions made in most coverage…
New APPS 