Coronavirus and cancer hijack the same parts in human cells to spread – and our team identified existing cancer drugs that could fight COVID-19 The Conversation US
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While I’ve done a fair share of posts here on the topic of trademarks and the alcohol industries, one of the most frustrating sub-types for those posts is the sort where the dispute exists between one wine maker and one brewery. There appears to be some misconception that alcohol is one big market or industry for the purposes of trademark. While it is true that far too few countries explicitly recognize that wine and beer are different markets in their trademark laws, most of the countries do still have customer confusion as a key test for infringement. And, I feel it’s safe to say, the general public can tell the difference between beer and wine, and typically know enough about each’s crafters to tell their branding apart.
Now the general public in Australia is facing this test in a way, with a large liquor chain trying to oppose the trademark application for a craft beer gift service over a wine trademark it holds, but doesn’t seem to be using.
The Beer Drop was officially launched in October 2019, with founder Evan Reitano filing to register its trademark in June 2019.
In January this year Coles opposed the trademark, saying it was “contrary to law” as it had substantially identical or deceptively similar trademarks – in this case, ‘Wine Drop’ which is currently not in use, and whose web page redirects to First Choice.
“Our Wine Drop subscription service was a popular service for our First Choice customers and the www.winedrop.com.au website currently redirects customers to the First Choice Liquor webpage,” a Coles representative told Brews News.
This appears to be as close to an admission that a trademark is no longer in use as one could hope for. “Was” a popular service. The website redirects to a different branded page. And that’s all before we get to the simple fact that wine and beer are not the same thing. Add to that that the word “drop” isn’t particularly source identifying and you begin to wonder how there’s a case to be made by Coles at all. And then we can add to all of that my suspicion that the Australian public can probably discern between a big retailer and a startup craft beer gift service. With that, this all begins to look silly.
It looks as though Beer Drop will be focusing on Coles’ failure to use the trademark, however, rather than beer and wine being distinct markets.
Reitano undertook a small business course before launching The Beer Drop and said it was invaluable to his IP experience so far, but what really stung was the references to ‘bad faith’”, he said.
“I read over it and I laughed it off at first, I had never heard of the Wine Drop, the first thing I did was jump onto Google. Being a Coles Liquor business you’d think it would be in the top one or two search hits which it wasn’t, and I can’t find any trace of it. It’s strange because they’ve said in their opposition that they’ve built a reputation with that brand, it feels like they expected me to read it and say shit, it’s Coles Liquor, let’s back off.”
Part of the reason for that may have been that Reitano worked for another Coles liquor brand in his past. Some folks have claimed that, since he worked for a Coles brand, he must have known about the Wine Drop trademark. That is obviously silly. Expecting a line employee to know about every trademark a company is no longer using is insane. And it’s also entirely besides the point because, again, this all ultimately boils down to the potential for customer confusion and here there is none.
You can take the stop-and-frisk out of the NYPD, but you can’t remove the biased policing, as the old saying goes. The NYPD may have been forced to stop pushing every minority up against the nearest wall/fence/cop car after a federal court determined this to be a violation of their rights, but they’re apparently continuing to enforce laws very selectively.
On Thursday night, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office became the first prosecutor in the city to release statistics on social-distancing enforcement. In the borough, the police arrested 40 people for social-distancing violations from March 17 through May 4, the district attorney’s office said.
Of those arrested, 35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white.
More than a third of the arrests were made in the predominantly black neighborhood of Brownsville. No arrests were made in the more white Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.
So, this is more than just anecdotal evidence. It’s, you know, evidence evidence. Plenty of anecdotal evidence exists of inconsistent social distancing enforcement is available, if you’re interested in seeing that as well.
I don't know specifics of each pic.
I do know:
-we all must abide by social distancing rules
-too many people aren't & its problematic
-many warned @NYCMayor about relying so heavily on @NYPDnews
-there's been no response to @nycpa request for summons/arrests demographic data pic.twitter.com/X0xwobrqX4— Jumaane Williams (@JumaaneWilliams) May 3, 2020
This bothers Mayor Bill De Blasio — the man who won the election by promising to be someone other than Mike Bloomberg, who loudly and proudly supported the NYPD’s “right” to harass and detain minorities. But he’s not upset enough. And he’s upset incorrectly. Critics are calling this selective enforcement of pandemic efforts a new stop-and-frisk. De Blasio is only upset about the terminology.
“What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”
That’s just talking around the problem. Yes, the pandemic response isn’t “systematic,” but the ingrained habits that have resulted in minorities being disproportionately targeted by NYPD officers certainly are. And his siding with the NYPD aligns him more with the man he replaced than the public that elected him. Both De Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea claim this enforcement has been deployed “sparingly and fairly.” It’s hard to square “fairly” with the numbers released by the Brooklyn DA.
It also doesn’t square with the total arrest numbers provided by the NYPD.
Citywide, black people make up 68 percent of those arrested on charges of violating social-distancing rules, while Hispanic people make up 24 percent, a deputy police commissioner, Richard Esposito, said late on Thursday night.
Only seven percent of the social distancing arrests citywide involved Caucasians.
The police union spoke up, because of course it did. The head of the PBA made one halfway decent point about bad laws and the problems inherent in enforcing them…
Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, declined to comment on Officer Garcia’s actions, but noted he and his colleagues “did not create the poorly conceived social-distancing policy they were sent out to enforce.”
… but followed that up by defending an officer who has been sued seven times and cost the city more than $ 200,000 in settlements. Officer Francisco X. Garcia was involved in a controversial social distancing arrest in which he punched a man onto the ground and then sat on him as he was handcuffed. Garcia has been removed from duty while this arrest is being investigated, which is apparently the equivalent of hanging this sinless man on the cross.
[Lynch] said City Hall was blaming Officer Garcia for carrying out the policy it had created. “Once again, our leaders are poised to trample a police officer’s rights in order to protect themselves,” he said.
Ah yes. Let’s not “trample” those rights. But the rights of everyone else can be trampled while the NYPD fumbles its way through the pandemic, making minorities pay the price for the social distancing sins of an entire city.
Biggest data breaches of 2019: Same mistakes, different year CNET
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