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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (169887)	8/25/2005 6:34:40 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I disagree about Disney. They've invested a great deal in promoting and establishing Mickey and crew as the image of their corporation. What happens if Mickey is taken and used as a gun toting character in a shoot-em-up video game? What if Mickey is used as a porn character? Should any rockhard frozen veggie company be able to use the Jolly Green Giant in their own packaging? Should any baked goods company or, for that matter, any organization be able to use the Michelin Man or Pop 'N Fresh as freely as they like in whatever way they like? Can I slap the Nike name and logo on my stuff and sell it to the general public? What if I slap the Rolex logo onto a Timex watch and sell it for a 1000% markup? Part of the copyright process is not just innovation, it's investment and differentiation and, even sometimes, consumer protection. The FDA sucks. It's more an arm of BigPharma than it is of the American Public. What do you think of the nutritional supplement industry? They got the government to back down on regulation as long as they followed some pretty loose and simple rules. Will megadoses of Vitamin E kill you? Maybe. I agree that the system doesn't work all the time but I still don't want the system tossed out on its ear. If it is, who knows what will be in the package we buy? As for cholesterol lowering drugs, I'm still waiting for anyone to prove the connection between lowering cholesterol and lengthening life or even preventing heart attacks. There are still all those disclaimers that those drugs are not proven to do these things.