More "Trademark" issues

Given the current level of business and governmental horsesh-t, I would not be surprised.

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:08:45 GMT, Flexgauger wrote:

Welcome to the modern Unites States where greed based litigation has replaced individual responsibility.. Companies must charge model companies fees because of the raised insurance premiums. What does insurance have to do with charging to make models of your trains or planes? If a kid gets hurt by a model of a Boeing 777 in Southwest airlines markings guess who gets sued? the model company? not necessarily. most hobby makers are too small to get a good sized settlement from. instead the attorneys go after the "deep pockets" , so southwest and Boeing get sued and will likely lose. even if they did not lose the legal costs are heavy. Therefore the insurance company is impacted .With these costs they have to recover then from someone so they raise premiums. to cover those costs and to spread the liability the companies have to charge fees and get liability releases from the hobby companies. Is this stupid? Indeed, but it is a fact of life in today's litigation mad society. It seems everyone thinks that the courts are the way to windfall money. Sue and get rich has become the howl of the masses. so what if it ruins businesses, raises costs and costs jobs, it might make the plaintiff rich so they go for it. the US once produced most of the private planes for the world but now has ceased that activity due to suits and court idiocy which makes the maker responsible for their craft forever no matter if the fault was poor maintenance of a 50 year old bird, The maker gets sued. their solution (and the only practical one) was to cease production of small planes and lay off many workers. All this idiocy has resulted in the US abrogating their lead in many industries because of insurance costs and fear of litigation. I am not surprised that an automaker bans production of small scale models of their vehicles. When a kid, being a kid, swallows an HO scale Chevy model, the parents sue GM. Just permitting such models to be made jeopardizes the company and the insurance will see the obvious higher risk of small models and there you go. The solution is not easy or comfortable. we are in dire need of a massive overhaul of the tort laws to limit these absurd money grams. Judgements need to be caped and penalties for bringing nuisance or absurd suits need to be installed and enforced. Only that will stop the need of manufacturers from need to demand releases and fees from hobby companies.

cat

I think the solution is simple but it will never happen when probably 80-90% of the people writing laws are attorneys. Make the court system a "winner takes all" event. If you sue me and you lose, then YOU have to pay whatever legal fees I had incurred to defend myself. That way, there is some real incentive to be reasonable when filing a lawsuit. As it is, you simply sue everyone much the same way you use a shotgun... point it in the general direction and you just might hit something.

Lawsuits are like playing the lottery with someone else's money. An attorney or group of attorneys agree to take your case for a (usually large) percentage of the potential settlement. It's like someone else buying your lottery tickets and you get to keep part of the money if you win. I'm sure that there are more similarities but I've ranted enough here.

Maybe if it gets bad enough, the ALPS printers will make a comeback and we can all produce our own decals for out own use. As far as I know, that doesn't infringe on anything.

dlm

Let's see, do you work for an insurance company, or a pharmaceutical company? Tort reform as the unwashed Rotarian Republican Libertarian masses propose it leaves people no way to combat overwhelming corporate greed, power and arrogance. If you really want to eliminate people suing a very peripherally related deep pocket because their precious offspring swallowed a tiny toy too small for his age group, then work on that, not just giving all corporate defencants a pass.

Sorry about that; I even have a rubber stamp that says "Spelling Counts!"

Probably a Freudian slip, thinking of Big Pharma and Prudential and UP must have led to "defecate" melding with defendant.

Ah, another with all the venom but no alternative proposal nor a real understanding of the issue. In short, part of the problem, not the solution.

cat

No answer, I see.

cat wrote: [...]

One may have enough knowledge to know there is a problem. It takes more knowledge to know what the problem is. It takes even more to understand the problem. It takes more than that to know whether there is a solution and apply it. And it takes a heck of a lot more to produce a solution.

There are those who don't know enough to know that there is a problem. They are dangerous: what you don't know cas hurt not only you but those around you.

But these people are not nearly as dangerous as those who know all about the problem but deny it. Even worse are those who know the solution, refuse to apply it because they don't want to spend the money.

And IME we all belong to all those categories, one way or another. Pogo was right.

Dan Merkel wrote: [...]

That's not socialism, that's just the ultimate development of the notion of individual rights above all. For if individual rights are supreme, then collective rights will always be trumped by individual demands. Never mind that in the long run we all pay for it, as you point out in the rest of your comment. (Socialism asserts the the equality of collective and individual rights. Communism asserts the primacy of collective over individual rights.)

Somewhere along the way the sense of obligation got lost. How and when? I can't specify a point in time, but I do note that many ads propose that "You Deserve It", and _no one_ questions that. There are many other signs and symptoms, but whatever you want to call the philosophy, socialism has nothing to do with it. Socialism is about collective rights. Whether the notion of collective rights ultimately makes any more sense than the notion of individual rights is another question. I used to think I had an answer, but I don't think so any more.

Wasn't St James who wrote that the love of money is the root of all evil?

No comment (I live in a country where most of my medical care is paid through my taxes.)

Sounds like the usual simplistic Rotarian view of a case that has become favorite folklore ampong he AynRanty set. To reply in a suitably simplistic way, I could tell you that I never buy the the overly hot brown liquid asserted by McDonalds to be coffee. I tasted some years ago and it was thin and rank.

I could also say that the woman in question did not seek a get rich quick settlement, but only her medical costs (around $11K). McD's stonewalled, and got exactl;y what they deserved in my opinion. People who know and appreciate well made coffee have pointed out that McD's coffeeoid substance is way too hot. My own cynical take on this is that is intended to prevent people discovering the lack of flavor, but then I'm a known bad corporate citizen, unwilling to believe what I see in commercials.

As far as your trundling out that old demon "socialism" from under the bed (where it has reposed with the Reds and the dust bunnies since McCarthy and HUAC fell into deserved disrepute) - well, I've seen legions (American and otherwise) of that sort come and go.

Too bad about Tom DeLay, eh?

-- Steve

Could First be next?

So long as the Frist shall not be last.

As long as we have politicians (of any stripe) we'll have corruption in high places.

Surely that refusal didn't extend to models of their locomotives.

Are you kidding us? If lawyers could get away with it, THAT is exactly what they'd want.

The winner would be lawyers, who can then base their fees on a "pay only if you win" basis, but at the same time make it a VERY substantial amount -- since the person who hires a tort lawyer will never have any responsibility to ever pay his/her fees, so why would they care what the lawyers fees are...

... or Tyco brass HO code 120 rail. I'm pretty sure that doesn't correspond to anything in the known world...

... and low places, too.

Yeah, I was just watching some film of the '60s on PBS, and there was Spiro Agnew. And there was Robert Bork claiming that communists and rock and roll destroyed respect for authority. What an ass! Authority committed suicide, and people like Bork and Agnew and Pat Buchanan (not to mention Nixon and gutless Hubert Humphrey and most of Johnson's cabinet, and those crooked AGs John Mitchell and Ed Meese) held the gun.

My wife missed most of that era, as she and her first husband were in Germany at the time; she remembered Paris '68, and Prague, but other than the assassinations of King and RF Kennedy (did Richard Mellon Scaife pay for both killings?) she has a "culture gap" for what I was knee deep in.

Time to go dig out that Fugs album ("It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest") - oh, rats, the turntable doesn't work anymore.