With a Heavy Heart… The Dervaes Family’s Apparent Descent Into Madness

March 5th, 2011

Path to Freedom inspired me to change my life. Early last decade, it was a candle in a dark room for me, so to speak. I can’t make similar statements about too many other things. Over the years, I’ve read their sites, sent them traffic with links from my sites, made several cash contributions to them and even bought a couple of T-shirts back in December to promote their message on my body! So, when I first heard the news about what they’re doing, I glanced at it and told myself, “This isn’t happening. Give it a few days and look again. Please, don’t let this be happening.”

Well, it’s happening.

Normally, when a previously good website, source or organization goes bad, what you’ll notice from me is that I turn my back. I stop linking. I’m not much into slinging mud at others, unless it’s fascist governments or corporations.

But this one hurts.

I was going to stick to my long running policy of just turning my back on this, but so many of you are writing in that I decided to post about it.

Please, if you feel the need to unburden yourself about this horrible situation, use this post to do that and stop emailing me. It’s a bit like grieving over someone who has died. I wouldn’t want people emailing me about my loss. It’s beyond words. I need to deal with it on my own.

Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation:

A leading candidate has emerged for the next EFF Takedown Hall of Shame induction: the Dervaes Institute, which is claiming broad ownership rights over the term “urban homesteading” — a term commonly used to describe a social movement dedicated to achieving more self-sufficient, sustainable living in cities. Last year, the Institute managed to register the term as a trademark (in connection with “educational services” such as blogging) and it is now sending takedown requests and warning letters targeting individuals and organizations that have been using the term for years.

The Dervaes campaign raises two related issues.

First, as explained in more detail in a letter EFF sent today on behalf of three of the targets (Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, and their publisher, Process Media), the legal claims are baseless. Even assuming the registration is valid — there are reasons to question it — the term “urban homesteading” is commonly understood to refer to a popular movement and related set of practices. Our clients — and anyone else — are free to use it in that descriptive sense, and that is exactly what they did.

Second, this dispute highlights the increased danger of granting rights in descriptive marks such as this one. Time was, the registration of this kind of mark might have had limited impact, because sensible mark-owners would think twice before bringing legal action and, short of such action, most legal users could ignore any improper threats. In the Internet context, however, individuals and organizations rely on service providers to help them communicate with the world (YouTube, Facebook, eBay, Blogger, etc.). A trademark complaint directed to one of those providers can mean a fast and easy takedown given that those service providers usually don’t have the resources and/or the inclination to investigate trademark infringement claims. Moreover, because there is no counter-notice procedure, the targets of an improper takedown have no easy way to get their content back up.

One Response to “With a Heavy Heart… The Dervaes Family’s Apparent Descent Into Madness”

  1. lagavulin says:

    I don’t have any personal connection with the Dervaes situation, but in the same context an issue that has embittered me (and still does) was the 1998 Copyright Extension Act. It basically allowed corporations to break the sunset clause whereby copyrighted works eventually turned-over into the public domain. Prior to this Act, it was held that while the creator of a work might be entitled to maintain rights over her creation, after the creator herself was dead and gone those rights should not live-on indefinitely for the benefit of others who did not participate in the creation — and this, by extension, also implied that the ‘public domain’ was a vital entity as well, whereby we all had the right to ‘collect’ the posthumous fruits from our collective human garden.

    But of course the distribution corporations (and undoubtedly the creators heirs in many cases) don’t wish to see control of potentially useful, profitable ‘resources’ slide into the useless, unprofitable, immaterial/idealistic ‘public domain’.

    This wiki page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act ) has a handy graphic showing the progression of copyright acts over the last century.

    At the core, all power and wealth boils down to the control of resources at or as close to their point of origin as possible…irregardless of whether those resources are material like oil or plastic pumpkins or seeds or guns, or completely immaterial like music or genetic-code or computer software or money.

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