I'll spare you all the typical Happy New Year post only because we're already half way through January. A lot of things have happened since the last time I posted, in fact, more than I could completely list right now.
Without a doubt the most notable thing that happened has to be our trip to Italy. I met my parents and sister at O'Hare on the 21st of December, and from there we were off to Rome by way of Zurich. We stayed in Rome, Siena, Florence, and Venice over the course of 8 days while visiting several tiny medieval towns along the way. We spent a day and a half in London before flying back to Miami on the 31st.
Seeing as how I took over 1100 pictures over the course of the 10 days, I'll spare you all the details I don't really remember and instead invite you to visit my Flickr photostream where I am slowly uploading the photos I took during the trip. It's taken me a bit to get the pictures up only because converting from RAW and then tagging/naming the photos is such a time-intensive process.
Technorati Tags: vacation, holiday, photography, photos, italy, europe, london
There is currently a bill out there in the British Parliament that, if passed, "will make it illegal to combine words like 'games', 'medals', 'gold', '2012', 'sponsor' or 'summer' in any form of advertising." Violators can be punished by fines of up to £20,000. So basically, anyone who isn't an official sponsor must completely ignore the Olympics are taking place. Will movie studios be sued because their movies are coming out in "summer 2012"? Will developers come under fire when they issue a press release mentioning that a video game has gone gold?
Sure, the word "Windows" is an every day word and it's trademarked, but you don't see Microsoft going around suing Home Depot for selling window treatments. The difference between "Windows" and the words the IOC is trying to effectively trademark is that the IOC's words include a year and a season. Not only that, since they have sponsors in a vast number of industries (from airliners to restaurants to clothing manufacturers), they can claim that practically anything using "their" words is an infringing use of those trademarks.
How much of our every day language will companies be able to own? Will we have to eventually pay royalties for every word we post in our blog or send over IM? What if we had a word surcharge line on our cell phone bills?
You know, I have to make money to survive. I'm going to get legislation passed that prevents any advertisers from using dollar and cents signs and periods. After all, why should other people cash in at my expense?
(from the BBC via Slashdot)
Technorati Tags: olympics, london, trademarks, government, 2012, games
