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[Leafsnail]

The element of it that's ridiculous is "Attempting to copyright a common colour", not "Suing someone in a different line of business", though.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

You don't even have to make up absurd examples to have absurd examples: how about Monster Cable suing Monster Energy Drink, Monster.com, and Monster Miniature Golf for using the word "monster"? Or the asshole who owned a dev studio with the word "edge" in it going around suing anything game related that involved the word "edge," over a decade after his company stopped producing anything?

It wasn't made up.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4281845.stm

Holy shit.

[GlyphGryph]

To keep this remotely on topic - despite those rights protections laws being anti-free market, they are no more left-wing than right-wing, and thus you can pretty easily defend yourself against their bas aspects while not allowing the other guy to gain from their good.

But then, right wings are obviously not 100% free market - they will readily admit some things are better handled in other ways! Whether patent law or national defense, and this allows you to segue into your own interpretation of what "right wings economics" even means - hopefully allowing you to drop the more atrocious bits and keep the good parts.

Also, let us know how it goes!

[Virex]

The element of it that's ridiculous is "Attempting to copyright a common colour", not "Suing someone in a different line of business", though.

It's not copyright it's trademark right you're talking about, which is meant to prevent unknown companies from piggybacking on the success of a well-known brand. Orange doesn't own the color orange in any shape or way, but using a distinct, orange color to identify your services is not allowed if there is a reasonable chance that your products are going to be confused with the products of Orange.

[Shade-o]

So while you should be fine with a fruit distribution company called 'Apple' or something similar, you should rethink it if you attempt to move into the electronics market.

[mainiac]

What? Believe it or not, Malthus' theories were batshit insane and dead wrong. People do not and have never actually reproduced to the point where meaningful amounts of the population are starving,

First of all, the Malthusian level isn't about mass starvation.  It's about the living levels falling until the growth rate does.  And if you look at any pre-industrial society, you will see humans living at that level once a society is well established, as has been documented across the globe in every complex society.

China in the 1930's is perhaps the most thoroughly documented case, but China hit the Malthusian level several times previously before.  Each time, agricultural innovations came along and raised the Malthusian threshold.  Read about the living conditions of a Chinese peasant in the 1930s or 1850s and get back to me on that whole people not reproducing into starvation thing.

Once you've done that, maybe you'd like to look at this thing called the 'feudal system'.  Notice how despite consistent agricultural improvements from it's implementation to it's abolishment, the lives of the peasants never really improved anywhere.  Notice how living conditions shot up across Europe after the Black Death and fell down to the same level afterwards.

As for the Roman example, guess what, the romans lived at the Malthusian level too!  They had a larger urban population, yes, but that urban population was also pretty poor and the vast majority of the empire was rural.  In fact the median Roman citizen was worse off then the median European was in the first few generations after the fall.

The crux of the Malthus was wrong thing lies in the fact that right after he wrote it, the industrial revolution happened which broke the Malthusian cycle.  But I dare you to point out one single society that wasn't either Malthusian or sparsely populated with a rising population.

To say that it's "batshit insane" that humans have a carrying capacity in their environment like every other organism on the planet is quite dismissive of a very important insight.

[Phmcw]

And don't forget the whole "intellectual property" deal. Those really fuck up competition by turning everything into a monopoly.

Um. What? Having a "monopoly" on your own product that you designed is hardly monopolizing at all unless you abuse the system heartily.

My tendency to overgeneralize everything strike again.
I'm of course speaking of the abuse of the whole copyright/patent/intellectual property system.
But copyright is the laws abuser's heaven.

[G-Flex]

The element of it that's ridiculous is "Attempting to copyright a common colour", not "Suing someone in a different line of business", though.

It's not copyright it's trademark right you're talking about, which is meant to prevent unknown companies from piggybacking on the success of a well-known brand. Orange doesn't own the color orange in any shape or way, but using a distinct, orange color to identify your services is not allowed if there is a reasonable chance that your products are going to be confused with the products of Orange.

This. People have to learn that "intellectual property" covers a variety of topics. Copyrights function differently from trademarks, which both function differently from patents. People reach weird conclusions sometimes by thinking they all work the same way.

Someone mentioned "Apple", which is a common word. Obviously you can't get a copyright on something like that, but you can register it as a brand name within a certain industry, which only prevents other people from working in that industry under the same name or otherwise misleading people into confusing your product/brand with theirs.