Oddbean new post about login | logout i think that there can be a decentralised form of trademark... isn't it literally counterfeiting to put someone else's mark on your stuff? trying to dupe people into buying it when it's not what they think it is? i don't like copyright but trademark is compatible with decentralised law imo
Yeah, I was being lazy and not parsing the details. Its scummy to pretend to be someone else. That said, we already have a solution for this in PGP signing
yes but obviously the origin of this is a distinctive mark trademark has never been related to copyright, it is a claim to sell on the market with a given distinctive and identifiable signature you could even say that the entire edifice of contract law depends on the fact that people's signatures are distinctive, and this long predates modern cryptography
i'm not sure that the history of trademarks goes back as far as copyright either... i'm pretty sure that it emerged in the days of the middle american century over the use of brands on cattle, and people trying to sell their sub-par cows as some highly regarded rancher's cows
I'd bet it starts earlier, in the guilds in Europe. Idk, but I've listened to a few lectures about those guilds and how they were writing laws both for their cities and inside their guild, and their use of ciphers to encode their messages. This goes back to at least the 12th century