NP Monday December 31, 2018

[mlooney 3,417]

33 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Look, that was three thousand years ago. Croco-Cola has entered the public domain. Try to keep up, Pharaoh.

Trademarks don't enter the public domain due to age.

Just saying.

 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

58 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Trademarks don't enter the public domain due to age.

Just saying.

 

Oh right, but it has still expired. Akhenaton despised Croco-Cola so didn't bother to renew the trademark.

[hkmaly 490]

5 hours ago, mlooney said:

5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Look, that was three thousand years ago. Croco-Cola has entered the public domain. Try to keep up, Pharaoh.

Trademarks don't enter the public domain due to age.

True. They also don't automatically work internationally. I don't think any current country honors trademark registrations from any country existing three thousand years ago. Madrid didn't exists back then.

[ijuin 572]

That may depend a bit on how we measure the age of a country. While there have been cultures and approximate territories that have endured for four thousand years and more (Egypt, China, etc.), there are very few governments that have exhibited such continuity (if we count a government as "ending" when it is overthrown/conquered or superseded by a new one, such as how the Kingdom of England was superseded by the Kingdom of Great Britain, and subsequently the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland). By that standard, there are only a handful of currently-active governments that are more than four hundred or so years old.

[hkmaly 490]

4 hours ago, ijuin said:

That may depend a bit on how we measure the age of a country. While there have been cultures and approximate territories that have endured for four thousand years and more (Egypt, China, etc.), there are very few governments that have exhibited such continuity (if we count a government as "ending" when it is overthrown/conquered or superseded by a new one, such as how the Kingdom of England was superseded by the Kingdom of Great Britain, and subsequently the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland). By that standard, there are only a handful of currently-active governments that are more than four hundred or so years old.

The term seems to be "legal continuity", as in "Revolutionary breach of legal continuity", however quick google doesn't seem to offer any useful list of countries having it longest. Any law student searching for funny thesis?

Anyway, there may be differences in relatively recent development, but I feel safe saying that finding ANY measurement which would suggest age over 3000 years would be hard and feel forced. Egypt was Roman province once, AND also part of Ottoman empire and British Empire more recently, all three sounds as pretty hard division points. China only unified 221 BC, and while Xinhai Revolution involved transfer of power, the Chinese Civil War require quite complicated doublethink to be seen as anything close to "continuity".

(There is also Succession of states, but that was based in 19th century, there are exceptions listed on the page and only few states signed the declaration made on 1978, so ...)

[ijuin 572]

Yeah, there are very few nations that have not had one of those breaches of continuity in the past few hundred years, so we can not really say that any government is ancient. We can however say that a number of cultures endured for thousands of years, changing slowly with the times rather than being displaced.

[hkmaly 490]

9 hours ago, ijuin said:

Yeah, there are very few nations that have not had one of those breaches of continuity in the past few hundred years, so we can not really say that any government is ancient. We can however say that a number of cultures endured for thousands of years, changing slowly with the times rather than being displaced.

Yeah, there is one specific culture which comes into mind as enduring a lot in last thousands of years despite not having own state until 1947 ....

In general, however, the cultures are prime case of grandfather's axe: not only they are changing, they are changing so much they may no longer have anything in common with original - or, the thing they have in common is now shared with multiple other cultures due to cultures merging and dividing. For lot of purposes, it's fine to argue they are the same culture, but if there is conflict between two cultures claiming to be same as a historic one the question which one is right is totally bogus.

Not that it would have anything to do with trademarks. In fact, trademark validity doesn't need any of this philosophy: valid trademark requires paper trail with regular confirmations that yes it's still valid.

PS: Regarding the "nations" .... there are quite a lot of national states today, but the idea itself didn't appeared before 1600 and most if not all today's nations are at least partially formed by some state at some specific point of time, without strict 1:1 correspondence to something existing before that like some ethnic group or tribe. Obviously, most nations would say that the nation existed well before that, but you need to trace it backwards from then.

Even the Egypt might not be entirely clear - there is Sudan and while I'm not that well versed with Egypt history, I suspect that different people have different opinion of what in history was Egypt nation, what Sudan and what was both. It's even more complicated with most European states. (Meanwhile, it's simple in US, but just because there was provably no US nation before 1492 and probably some time afterwards as well.)

(Note that we don't even need to look at China here as China is obviously not national state today.)

[ChronosCat 155]

7 hours ago, hkmaly said:

(Meanwhile, it's simple in US, but just because there was provably no US nation before 1492 and probably some time afterwards as well.)

That depends on how you define "nation". There were some city-states, as well as the Iroquois Confederacy... And actually the term "nation" is often used to describe Native American tribes (and not just modern ones).

Also, outside of what is now the US there have been various Pre-Columbian empires in the Americas, such as the Aztec and Inca.

Edited January 6, 2019 by ChronosCat
Forgot the quote specifically named the US.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

10 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

That depends on how you define "nation". There were certainly several empires (such as the Aztec and Inca), as well as a number of city-states. There was also the Iroquois Confederacy... And actually the term "nation" is often used to describe Native American tribes (and not just modern ones).

And the Olmecs, for that matter. Mind you, I don't know how big the Olmecs were on copyrights and trademarks.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, ChronosCat said:

8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

(Meanwhile, it's simple in US, but just because there was provably no US nation before 1492 and probably some time afterwards as well.)

That depends on how you define "nation". There were some city-states, as well as the Iroquois Confederacy... And actually the term "nation" is often used to describe Native American tribes (and not just modern ones).

Also, outside of what is now the US there have been various Pre-Columbian empires in the Americas, such as the Aztec and Inca.

I wasn't aware any of those could be though of as US. I considered obvious that those were conquered by US. And generally, I though that any state on American continent bases its identity on European settlers and not on natives. They are using European languages, after all.

[ChronosCat 155]

7 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I wasn't aware any of those could be though of as US. I considered obvious that those were conquered by US. And generally, I though that any state on American continent bases its identity on European settlers and not on natives. They are using European languages, after all.

I see your point; the only pre-US governments which could be said to have any continuity with the modern US government would be the colonial governments (particularly the British-affiliated ones). It just wasn't originally clear to me that was what you meant, and Native American civilizations are ignored or forgotten so much that I like to remind people about them whenever it seems like that might be happening.

 

[hkmaly 490]

55 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

It just wasn't originally clear to me that was what you meant, and Native American civilizations are ignored or forgotten so much that I like to remind people about them whenever it seems like that might be happening.

To be fair, the Iroquois Confederacy surprised me with how politically advanced it was. I know about Aztec (in Central America) and Inca (in South America) but didn't know about anything similarly advanced in North America. But, I would definitely consider native american tribes nations.

[ijuin 572]

15 hours ago, hkmaly said:

PS: Regarding the "nations" .... there are quite a lot of national states today, but the idea itself didn't appeared before 1600 and most if not all today's nations are at least partially formed by some state at some specific point of time, without strict 1:1 correspondence to something existing before that like some ethnic group or tribe. Obviously, most nations would say that the nation existed well before that, but you need to trace it backwards from then.

If we define "nation-state" as a state that defines itself primarily as comprising a specific culture, then yes it is a modern invention, with most earlier states being defined more by way of "whatever territory and people the government can maintain control of" (i.e. territory by conquest) without regard to ancestral culture. The idea that people who didn't already have a King or an Army deserved to have a state of their own really didn't gain much traction until the colonial powers (having become world powers) started extending their umbrella of protection to make protectorates out of such peoples, creating a new category that was more independent than a puppet state but still under the dominion of a larger power.

5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

To be fair, the Iroquois Confederacy surprised me with how politically advanced it was. I know about Aztec (in Central America) and Inca (in South America) but didn't know about anything similarly advanced in North America. But, I would definitely consider native american tribes nations.

They were surprisingly advanced for a society that did not use a writing system (and thus had to keep all of their laws inside their heads, with consensus defining who has the "correct" remembrance of the laws and binding contracts).

[hkmaly 490]

18 hours ago, ijuin said:

On 1/6/2019 at 2:40 PM, hkmaly said:

PS: Regarding the "nations" .... there are quite a lot of national states today, but the idea itself didn't appeared before 1600 and most if not all today's nations are at least partially formed by some state at some specific point of time, without strict 1:1 correspondence to something existing before that like some ethnic group or tribe. Obviously, most nations would say that the nation existed well before that, but you need to trace it backwards from then.

If we define "nation-state" as a state that defines itself primarily as comprising a specific culture, then yes it is a modern invention, with most earlier states being defined more by way of "whatever territory and people the government can maintain control of" (i.e. territory by conquest) without regard to ancestral culture. The idea that people who didn't already have a King or an Army deserved to have a state of their own really didn't gain much traction until the colonial powers (having become world powers) started extending their umbrella of protection to make protectorates out of such peoples, creating a new category that was more independent than a puppet state but still under the dominion of a larger power.

I have suspicion that the real reason is that map-makers started to like political maps. The idea of neatly dividing whole world into countries, with no overlap and nothing being left out ...

18 hours ago, ijuin said:

On 1/7/2019 at 0:32 AM, hkmaly said:

To be fair, the Iroquois Confederacy surprised me with how politically advanced it was. I know about Aztec (in Central America) and Inca (in South America) but didn't know about anything similarly advanced in North America. But, I would definitely consider native american tribes nations.

They were surprisingly advanced for a society that did not use a writing system (and thus had to keep all of their laws inside their heads, with consensus defining who has the "correct" remembrance of the laws and binding contracts).

Considering the ways laws are written, I don't think it was that much different from how current western democracies work with them

(We can write it, but someone still needs to remember what it was supposed to mean.)

[ijuin 572]

22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I have suspicion that the real reason is that map-makers started to like political maps. The idea of neatly dividing whole world into countries, with no overlap and nothing being left out ...

That works for explaining why there is no more "no man's land" anywhere, but not for explaining why The Congo should be considered independent instead of a part of its former hegemon Belgium.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

23 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I have suspicion that the real reason is that map-makers started to like political maps. The idea of neatly dividing whole world into countries, with no overlap and nothing being left out ...

That works for explaining why there is no more "no man's land" anywhere, but not for explaining why The Congo should be considered independent instead of a part of its former hegemon Belgium.

You know how hard is to color the map in way no two countries with shared border have same color when you consider commonwealth single country?