Russian Man Copyrights the ;)

We know and love them. The are the emoticon. Well this just might be one of the funniest things I have ever read. It was on BBC tonight. Here is the full ariticle and a link to it at the bottom. I bolded the parts that make me literally bust out laughing.

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“Russian hopes to cash in on ;-)

A series of punctuation marks used to convey a wink in text messages – known as an emoticon – has been trademarked in Russia, says a local businessman.

Entrepreneur Oleg Teterin said the trademark for the ;-) emoticon was granted to him by Russia’s federal patent agency.

But critics doubt the trademark’s legal basis as the emoticon has been in the public domain for years.

Mr Teterin said he would chase firms using the symbol without permission.

“I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder,” Mr Teterin said in comments on the Russian TV channel, NTV.

“Legal use will be possible after buying an annual licence from us,” he was quoted by the newspaper Kommersant as saying.

“It won’t cost that much – tens of thousands of dollars,” added the businessman, who is president of Superfone, a company that sells advertising on mobile phones.

But he said he does not plan on tracking down individual users of the emoticon.

He also said since other similar emoticons – :-) or ;) or :) – resemble the one he has trademarked, use of those symbols could also fall under his ownership.

Some observers say the announcement by Mr Teterin is a gimmick.

The president of Russian social networking site odnoklassniki.ru, Nikita Sherman said: “You’re not likely to find any retards in Russia who’ll pay Superfone for the use of emoticons”.

Alexander Malis, a director of the firm Vympelkom, said his company would not pay on principle, and jokingly suggested patenting brackets.

According to Russian media, Mr Teterin is not the first person to try to trademark the ;-) symbol in Russia.

Kommersant said in 2005 a St Petersburg court upheld an appeal from the German corporation Siemens, which was sued by a Russian man claiming he held the trademark. ”

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From BBC News

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4 Comments

  1. This post has nothing to do with the above blog.

    I was trying to find the pictures of you tossing your camera while taking a picture so I could post this:
    http://picasaweb.google.com/magnusmouse/LEDAndTime#

    But none of the keywords on which I searched turned up that page. Then I was going to try browsing the archive, but that didn’t work, as it seems the archive is broken. Anyway, enjoy the link.

  2. Search on “toss”. Here they are:

    http://www.husar.us/blog/archives/1287

    http://www.husar.us/blog/archives/1282

    Are these from you? They are pretty sweet. One thing I just recently discovered was painting with light. It is a process were you photograph a person is a totally dark room and use a flashlight to paint them into a long exposure. I will find the link to it again and post it. Pretty cool stuff.

  3. They are not my my photos, but I thought you would enjoy. As for the keyowrd search, I was looking for camera throw, not camera toss. I tried camera by itself, but that was too many results. I also tried Guinness camera (knowing I said Guinness in my comments), but it doesn’t look like the search checks the comments and the main blog post.

    Maybe sometime this weekend I’m going to try these types of photos as well, they look sweet. A tripod and a hour or so should do the trick.

  4. I look forward to seeing the results.

    This reminds me I have some tripping photo mistakes from my last tattoo session. I have trying to take a photo and the iPhone was doing a long shutter delay so I would move the camera when it wasn’t done. Instead of my side I get the curtains in the show and they were all blurred and in motion. I will dig them out this weekend and post.

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