Verbing Weirds Google [Slashdot]

And this, from the American Dialect Society Mailing List, documents an interesting part of this most curious postmodern phenomena. For what is next, the trademarking of words like "stuff," or "dog" or "cheese?"

Miasma [TM][R]

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 06:44:02 -0500 Reply-To: abatefr@earthlink.net Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List Comments: To: "DSNA list," From: Frank Abate Subject: FW: Google trademark concerns Comments: To: ADS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear lexos and others:

Paul McFedries gives us (see below) a classic instance of what happens when the growth of the language cuts across someone's proprietary interest.

Of course google is used as a verb. And why not? It only makes sense, it is short, it is fun, it works. And what the Google (TM) lawyer knows, but does not say, is that the company he represents cannot do anything about its use as a verb, legally. They cannot sue, as one cannot claim proprietary rights to a verb. Jesse Sheidlower recently pointed this out to me; apparently it is an explicit part of US law re trademarks.

So the lawyer is really merely trying to get Paul McF to do something that he need not do, but hopes he will be scared into it by having received a letter from a corporate attorney -- enough to get anyone's attention. I'll bet it was sent certified mail with a return receipt requested -- that always impresses (and scares) people.

The bottom line on this is the following:

1. The English language has a verb, google. It is new, but it is in widespread use, and this can be documented.

2. It is perfectly right and legal for dictionaries to cover this new verb, or any new usage for that matter.

3. The company Google apparently has a trademark interest in the use of the term "Google" (whether capital or not), but legally, by statute, can only protect that use as anything other than a verb. So, if someone were to come along and set up a similar service to what Google does and use the word google on that service, then Google could sue to stop that. They could even, conceivably, get a cease-and-desist order from a judge to stop that use instantly, during the waiting period for a trial on the matter. This is within their legal rights as trademark holder, assuming that they have filed for a trademark for the exclusive use of the word commercially.

4. Paul McF -- or any lexicographer or dictionary publisher -- can and should cover the language as they see fit. They should not feel restricted by trademark issues, as regards whether they report on actual, documentable usage. That sort of reporting is the same as what journalists do, and so, in a sense, if not in actual, legal fact, is protected by the First Amendment as a matter of free speech. Reporting on usage is not a violation of another's commercial interests, at least not unless the circumstances are VERY unusual.

5. The best policy to follow in cases like this, as regards how a dictionary should handle these sorts of things, is to report on the usage and have the evidence ready to back up what the entry says. If a term is a trademark item or may be a trademark item, it is good practice to acknowledge this explicitly in the entry, in a note or in the etymology. Having done that, the entry should report on the usage.

6. Finally, it is good practice to put a general note in the front matter of a dictionary (or equivalent place for an e-dict) saying that the mention of "trademark" (or similar words) in any of the entries does not affect the actual legal status of the term, but is merely an acknowledgment that the lexicographers have found in their research that there may be a trademark (or similar) claim with regard to certain terms in the dictionary.

In short, Usage trumps Legality, in this instance, at least.

Frank Abate

11:50:31 PM    

Just throwing some emphases below. Tom Matrullo brings an interesting perception to most things.

to our senses.

"lp2"

I posted this in one of Shelley Powers' comments, amid a discussion of Google/Pyra, and intended to elaborate it a bit:

...we keep thinking in terms of news reportage and commentary as having greater or lesser authority as it has more or less power to represent some external reality. Big Media has decided it can also represent "our" internal reality, as when it mourns for us. I doubt this can remain viable, especially now that we do have a means of sharing what we experience, as opposed to having Tom Brokaw read it to us. The pointillistic representational realm of blogs, especially when coupled with the semantic potentialities of Google, could lead to a richer, more vibrant realm that does not replace journalism, but provides a more resonant context in which news reports can be contemplated.

I like that reference, "pontillistic representation" pulls in feelings of movements in art.

The basic idea is simple: In the 18th century, as cafes and salons brought people together, public conversational spaces opened up, connections between persons, ideas, and disciplines were forged, things began to happen. Things we still live inside of, like democracy by revolution, historiography, etc.

Like an Awakening of those who have been asleep, or at least rendered sonambulistic by one-way Old Media force feeding and mind-fuck.

The U.S. has been derelict in keeping up a certain level of public conversation. Quite some time ago, any semblance of it was replaced by corporate messages artfully tricked out to seem like a mirthful bouquet of harmless, because mindless, bits of disjointed information, guided by no intellect, curiosity, imagination, or passsion.

Derelict? The US has often been mocked for anti-intellectualism, and while Mark Twain-style frontier-speak and plain-talking is to be valued, stupidity and ignorance are not, and these are things Americans, for all their ingenuity, have not perceived how much to the world we appear dupes, lacking full critical facilities--too easily conned by an authoritarian appeal. The only culture that fares worse are the Germans, who spawned a great university system, yet still love to march.

Meanwhile, people starved for these attributes of intellect keep finding that some of the time, they may be found on the Net, on blogs like Shelley's, for example.

Oddly, this very exhibition of spirited dialogue is pooh-poohed, occasionally by the very bright folks who take the trouble to share their intelligence.

These "bright folks" are a euphemism for Old Media journalists, no? And while they share their intellect, they also share the heady sense that the 4th Estate is entitled to its accoutrements of power, and jealously guards its gatekeeper position because it feels threatened, as threatened as the 1st and 2nd Estates felt with the rise of the merchant & guild class in the waning years of the Middle Ages (or Dark Ages, if you will, for it took such a revolutionary overthrow to emerge from the imposed hardened arteries of darkness, and so it will take now.

Sharing what we apprehend, filtered through several minds capable of informing and disproving each other, offers glimpses of possibilities of larger representational richness than what we've grown used to.

Reflex dismissal of the possibilities inherent in this new public space for speech - before they've been explored - is not uncommon in the wake of the blogger/google hook-up. It seems premature. A few short years ago, no one saw Google coming.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

I've found reflexive dismissal is simply the arrogance of power, and when corporate journalists wear this cloak, it betrays something worse, a reluctance to ask hard questions, the questions journalists are supposed to ask, because they could disturb the status quo.

Miasma
2:57:20 AM    

It drives me utterly mad with lust.

It makes me think about Marshall McLuhan and how the media shapes not only messages but also cultures that spring up, facilitated by such media. More on that below.

Miasma, the pistachio-eater

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you[base ']ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

OK, I'd accept that as a good start! But soon I'd need more space. [G]

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

Again, I'd need more time. I'd have plasma screens rotating images on poster-sized screens in every room. By then we would be using wall-sized screens, so eventually I'd want more bandwidth too. I am ever the bandwidth pig, but even more so, for I become a digitally-driven Ansel Adams with an 8x10 view camera if you give me world enough and time.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

Surely the revolution in musical tastes, less overdetermined by playlists and rotations and scarcity and monopolies and more by choice will give us all great evolving and self-selected jukeboxes and the entire Library of Congress Library in audio books too. Great works of literature shall be our room wallpaper, as now I am listening to poetry collections from Audible. To each house a closet rack of servers, and to each house a good night!

Not to mention peer-to-peer satellite-fed Net Radio from whatever house may choose to share with the peers it designates, or perhaps those peers who subscribe?

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Ooh, the bandwidth I could suck with wall-size video. I will soon run out!

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Hardly. We will have advanced home searching systems on par with Google. We will have new interfaces, new GUIs, new navigational metaphors. We will swim in VR and use the multi-layered approach of the software I saw demonstrated once called "Cloud." Oh for the infinite layering!

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson[base ']s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don[base ']t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can[base ']t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

[The Shifted Librarian]

I think she means our brains will explode. Frankly, I can't wait.

"Thus, if we cannot make our sun stand still, then we will make him run." Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress

Miasma
2:29:21 AM    

Salon.com | Raise Limbaugh's blood pressure! Keep Salon in business [Daypop Top 40]

[chest tumping alert!]

Yup, I am a Salon subscriber, premium service. I resisted for a long time, but eventually admitted that I was powerless over my addiction, and I had to turn it over to a higher power along with doing a searching and fearless moral inventory...

Wait, wrong meeting. Sorry.

What I mean is that I sucked it up and bit the bullet after long resisting, because I don't believe in the subscription model on the web, and figuring I'd resent it even as I resent having registered for the NYTimes site and having been a long time hater of the Time Warner Pathfinder site in the mid-90s asking me to sign over rights to my first born child before I could even log on...

As in, this STUNK of OLD MEDIA.

But then I did it. I wanted an article dammit! And since I know how to get around the NYTimes archive fee charge (not gonna tell how...), this is the ONLY one I did cough up for.

Funny thing happened on the way to being co-opted. I started really using the premium service and liking it. Liked the little music compilation thingie too. Not to mention the Mother Jones and Utne Reader subscriptions. Good will. Then they added blogs, and I'm still happy even tho my blog isn't in that club.

Worse, I would be sad if Salon went away in a way that I would not be sad if Slate went away (has it gone away?). Obviously I subscribe to it in my news feed reader and Radio aggregator.

I like its righteous ballsy streak. I miss Suck.com, and that sucks. There are a lot of things we could and do miss because VC interpreted the dot.com bomb as an excuse to take leave of what little imagination and vision the pathetic souls had in the first place.

So they say Salon spends too much money and lives too high in its offices. That these periodic death throes are con jobs to get more money and get propped up a bit longer.

To that, I say, "What the fuck? It is a hell of a lot better than those far more periodic beg-fests on public radio and television, and I cough up for those every 5 years or so when I am flush and when the guilt hits me."

Salon is like a less serious and more mouthy version of NPR, and for that I love it. And if you need more reasons, here's their version of a beg-fest. Come on, y'all. Cough it up. It isn't as bad as you might think.

Miasma

Did you ever get the feeling that some people want you dead? Last week's flurry of news stories about Salon's imminent demise produced another wave of hate mail from those eager to dance on our grave. (The fact that Salon never seems to actually die -- despite the tone of absolute certainty in these perennial press obits that this time, yes, it MUST be going under! -- never diminishes these letter writers' bloodlust.)

[...]

Stan Willock offers these words of consolation to Salon readers: "[They] will still have PBS, where hundreds are misinformed and entertained at taxpayer expense, as well as CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All are losing viewers to the fair and balanced Fox News Channel and to conservative talk radio. Best of luck looking for a new job. Hopefully you qualify as a member of a preferred group (person of color, female, gay, lesbian, etc)."

[...]

Salon -- and I -- take all these attacks in stride. As Ishmael Reed observed, "writin' is fightin'." When you publish a rambunctiously independent daily in a time marked by conservative backlash and martial fever, you're bound to make some enemies. And we're proud of those we've made over the years, from Ken Starr to John Ashcroft and, of course, the right-wing guidance counselors at the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages.

[...]

Chris Broderick wrote, "As a subscriber, I don't really know what I can do, but damn, there's got to be a way. With the way things are now in the world, I really rely on you people to give the news that I perceive to be the truth. I am so goddam frustrated with the mainstream media and their neglect of truthful reporting. It's going to be like a death in the family if you guys go down."

Mark E. Michael e-mailed: "I stumbled on you a few years back and then told my wife and her sister about this great e-zine (as it was once called). You have given us some wonderful memories, but we don't want them to end. And we cannot let right-wing voices be the only ones heard. There are elements in the government that wish to silence dissent and do it permanently. There will be no marketplace of ideas, only the authorized, approved one ... How can Salon be saved?"

[...]

If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even this year. In the current economic climate, advertising cannot be counted on to secure Salon's future. But YOU can help do that by buying at least one gift subscription.

The enemies of a free and critical press -- like the ministers of information at the Wall Street Journal -- want to write off Salon as dead. With our voice silent, there will be one less bullhorn to question the wisdom of our country's current direction. The world is becoming increasingly dangerous. As reader Mark E. Michael warned, don't let the "authorized" version become the only one you read. Help us fight the good fight. Thank you.

-- David Talbot Editor, salon.com

12:47:09 AM