Law

Intellectual property

Adidas backtracks on opposition to Black Lives Matter trademark request | Business | The Guardian

Adidas has withdrawn a request to US authorities to block the Black Lives Matter movement from trademarking a design featuring three parallel stripes.

Because of how the politics of it looked (pun noted)…

I dare not show the image, but the BLM had the eponymous words in a black font, with three horizontal parallel lines in green underneath the text.

What next: the whole of geometry?

Really?

No offence

‘Dirty wee torturers’: Northern Irish man tells of British army abuse during Troubles | Northern Ireland | The Guardian

A doctor examined Auld and declared him fit for interrogation. For at least seven days and nights he was subjected to what became known – in reports by Amnesty International and other organisations – as the five techniques: the stress position, hooding, white noise, deprivation of sleep and little food and drink. When Auld moved from the stress position he was beaten. Occasionally the hood was removed and lights were shone into his eyes.

Several of the men, including Auld, were bundled on to a helicopter and thrown out, thinking they were high up. They were a few feet from the ground.

Auld assumed he would eventually be killed so tried to end his suffering by hurling himself at heating pipes to break his neck. “But I just hurt my head. That, for me, was the worst because I couldn’t die. That sense of helplessness and isolation was horrendous.”

Auld was eventually transferred to a prison, then a mental health hospital, before returning home. He was not charged with any offence.

In a case taken by the Irish government, the European court of human rights ruled in 1978 that the treatment of the “hooded men” was inhuman and degrading but not torture. Auld received £16,000 in compensation. After 9/11 the Bush administration cited the ruling to defend its “enhanced interrogation” policy.

It’s just business

The painfully high price of Humira is patently wrong | Financial Times

But nearly half of new drugs launched in the US in 2020-21 were priced at more than $150,000 a year, so others have followed its lead. An entire industry has moved towards making products that are breathtakingly expensive.

Please, please, start thinking about reining in IPR.

If you want to kill somebody….

Address issues at home before criticising Qatar over World Cup | Qatar | The Guardian

Such data bears witness to an old trade union adage – if you want to kill someone and get away with it, first set up a company, then employ them. (Steve Tombs, Emeritus professor, Open University)

By design, not bugs, in the law regarding corporations and persons.

The Problem of Our Laws

by reestheskin on 21/03/2022

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Our laws are unfortunately not widely known, they are the closely guarded secret of the small group of nobles who govern us. We like to believe that these old laws are scrupulously adhered to, but it remains a vexing thing to be governed by laws one does not know. I am not thinking here of various questions of interpretation and the disadvantages that stem from only a few individuals and not the population as a whole being involved in their interpretation. These disadvantages may in any case be overstated. The laws a(er all are so old, centuries have worked on their interpretation, even their interpretation has in a sense become codi)ed, and while there is surely room still for interpretation, it will be quite limited. Moreover, the nobility has no reason to bend the law against us, if only because the laws were in their favour from the very beginning, the nobility being outside the law, and that is why the laws seem to have been given exclusively into their hands. There is wisdom in this disposition – who could question the wisdom of the old laws? – but it remains vexing for the rest of us. Presumably that is not to be avoided…

Franz Kafka. The Problem of Our Laws’ – ‘Zur Frage der Gesetze’ – translated by Michael Hofmann. Link

For reasons of State

Stephen Sedley · A Decent Death · LRB 21 October 2021

A sharp pen from Stephen Sedley, a former appeal court judge, in the LRB.

Absurdly and cruelly, until the 1961 Suicide Act was passed it was a crime to kill yourself. While those who succeeded were beyond the law’s reach, those who tried and failed could be sent to jail. In the 1920s the home secretary had to release a Middlesbrough woman with fourteen children who had been given three months in prison for trying to kill herself. There is a Pythonesque sketch waiting to be written about a judge passing a sentence of imprisonment for attempted suicide: ‘Let this be a lesson to you and to any others who may be thinking of killing themselves.’ In fact, by the mid 19th century the law had got itself into such a tangle that a person injured in a failed attempt at suicide could be indicted for wounding with intent to kill, an offence for which Parliament had thoughtfully provided the death penalty.

But the repeated resort by doctrinal opponents of assisted dying to the need for safeguarding tends to be directed not to resolving any difficulties but to amplifying and complicating them to the point of obstruction – the kind of argument which, as Gore Vidal once put it, gives intellectual dishonesty a bad name.

[emphases added]