Trademarks, or Coming to you direct from Satan

 

 I use these Satanic symbols to introduce this entry on trademarks not because I see anything devilish in the concept or legal entity of trademarks. Actually, I find even less troublesome in them than patents.A legal description of a trademark is as follows:

A trademark is a work, symbol, or combination thereof that is used to identify the source, albeit a possibly anonymous source, of goods. Examples of  trademarks include Nike, Rolls Royce, and Kleenex.

Essentially, trademarks are the identifying symbols of a brand. And I see branding as bluntly a specialized, commercial sort of naming. Legal discussions of trademarks' "functioning to perform source identification" can be more plainly describe trademarks as the names and symbols of companies. In the same way that I would be committing fraud to present myself as Cass Sunstein  (whom I am certainly not) in a grad school application, it  makes sense that it would also be something like fraud for me to begin selling  hastily repackaged Tobascco sauce as "Satan's Revenge" using the identifying trademarks of the Cosmopolitan Trading Co. Fraud, per se, I take as being nearly unanimously unethical.

The major problem, at this point, that I have with IP is its role vis-a-vis the privatization of the commons, and the deleterious effects thereof. Trademarks seem to me to exist outside of that conflict. Identity must fundamentally maintain uniqueness and integrity, at least some of the time, for legitimate interactions between actors to take place. I, as an actor, must be able to correctly identify another actor in order to have an honest, legitimate interaction with him/her/it. For this reason it is useful, and more importantly nondestructive, to legally prohibit violations of brand integrity. I have only now an introduction to trademarks as legal conventions, but the worst I can say about them is that is rather silly that the "wasp waisted" Coca-Cola bottle is trademarked.