Stealing the language by Milota Sidorova

It was just yesterday when I came across an article that one Slovak company has patented a name „Vysoké Tatry“ and put a registration mark on it. You say, ok, nevermind. But if you look closer, you will know that the name „Vysoké Tatry“ is an official name for a city lying in Slovak highest and once the most beautiful national park. The mountains of wild, rocky peaks reaching up to 2,600 meters that are just awesome are called the same name - „Vysoké Tatry“. And here we come to the situation that a company for a product registers this name on its own. The name that is pointing to the city and to the great, precious and bre! athtaking area. The name is now a symbol for a product, but who knows it? Privatisation is a trend of our era, that is out of question, the question remains to which extent it is still acceptable. What happens if tomorrow someone decides to register a word „sun“ or a „moon“ for its product or necessity and whole human kind will have to pay for using that word. The system that some businessmen and politicians label as „ethical“ is lacking the smallest sense of logic. But I am sure, it is a perfect motive for an absurd comedy as well as it should be a motive for grave discussion. Yesterday Facebook succeeded with registering the word „face“ for its business purposes. U.S. Patent and Trademark accepted Facebook could use in certain context, literally only for „telecommunication services, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general inte! rest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, n! one prim arilu featuring or relating to monitoring or to cars“ - at least that's what does the document say. So from now on Facebook has a monopoly to use „face“ in this field. The company is also fighting to register another word „book“ so it would have another reason to sink down social network Teachbook.com on the trial. Let's just hope Facebook will not have tastes for adapting whole dictionary or will not get inspired by Slovak model.

related story (sgx18661): http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/facebook_could_soon_own_the...

by Milota Sidorova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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