Wal-mart wants exclusive rights on all smiley faces

Wal-mart is taking legal action to have exclusive rights to use the yellow smiley face. This is despite two uncomfortable facts.

First, they did not invent the smiley face, and they are not pretending that they did.

Second, the smiley face was widely used well before Wal-mart started using it.

Wal-mart’s grounds for the claim to exclusive trademark rights, according to spokesman John Simley (not a misspelling), is that they have a “tremendous investment” in it and people associate it with them.

But that doesn’t give them exclusive rights to smiles any more than a “tremendous investment” in and close identification with Conservative Culture would give me exclusive rights to the word “blog.”

Hat tip to Chuckoblog.

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