Over at UncivilSociety and now Blog@Newsarama, I've been writing about the intellectual property issues raised by the recent court ruling in which the family of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel regained copyright in the Superman material in Action Comics #1.
Below: a couple religious t-shirts and a poster appropriating the Superman trademark. You will believe a God can fly . . .
Above: A Jesus Malverde scapular. For more, check out this article in today's New York Times:
Malverde items are typically sold at botánicas — alternative-medicine pharmacies found in Hispanic neighborhoods that sell herbs, ointments and assorted good luck and black magic charms and potions.
“People say Malverde helped me do this or that; mostly it’s people into drugs who think he’ll shield them from the police,” said Raul Gonzalez, owner of a botánica called Mystic Products in Compton, Calif. “It’s the power of the mind, you know. They believe it, so they take chances and get away with it, but they will eventually get caught.”
Indeed, drug enforcement authorities in Mexico and the United States said Malverde statues, tattoos and amulets can be tip-offs to illegal activity.
“We send squads out to local hotel and motel parking lots looking for cars with Malverde symbols on the windshield or hanging from the rearview mirror,” said Sgt. Rico Garcia with the narcotics division of the Houston Police Department. “It gives us a clue that something is probably going on.”
Courts in California, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas have ruled that Malverde trinkets and talismans are admissible evidence in drug and money-laundering cases.
The Christian abstinence movement has swayed a number of administrators in U.S. schools to establish an abstinence-only curriculum in their sex-ed classes. Two teens in Illinois have been suspended for protesting the abstinence message in their school by wearing t-shirts festooned with condoms and brandishing the message, "Safe Sex or No Sex."
My favorite bit from this story: the argument that being a priest exempts you from airport security searches. Were that the case, I'd be tempted to sign up.
A man dressed as a priest caught at Amsterdam's airport with three kilos of cocaine under his vestments claimed to police that his packages contained "holy sand", Dutch police said.
Police stopped the man at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport as he was transiting on a flight from South America, Robert Van Aapel, a spokesman for the Dutch Royal Military Police told CNN by phone Saturday.
"He refused to be searched saying that he was a religious person and it was not allowed," Van Aapel said.
"However, this is normal procedure so our officers insisted. They asked him again and after the second time they carried out the search and discovered the man had packs strapped to his legs below his priest's clothes. He told us they contained holy sand," he said.
He said the man, who is aged around 40 and a Bolivian national, was arrested Thursday after arriving in to the airport on a flight from Lima, Peru. He was attempting to transit on a flight to Milan when he was apprehended with the cocaine, worth around €105,000 ($155,000).
The Bolivian appeared in court Friday on charges of drug smuggling, Van Aapel said.
Dutch police are trying to establish if the man is a real priest after he claimed to be a senior member of the clergy in the Bolivian capital La Paz, he added.
Thor's hammer pendant from jelldragon.com
From a wire service round-up in today's New York Post:
A mead horn surely would make time in prison pass that much easier.
A Utah prisoner is suing the Department of Corrections for denying him his right to practice an ancient Nordic religion.
Michael Polk says prison officials have denied him the mead horn, rune staff, prayer cloth, sword and Thor's hammer that he needs to practice his religion.
Officials say the items were denied due to security reasons.
Polk will lose if he's looking to carry a real sword, staff and hammer--it's a slam dunk, really--but if I were one of the officials I would have provided the prayer cloth, if only to establish a record of reasonable accommodation. After all, a court did recently rule in favor of an inmate seeking to wear a Thor's Hammer pendant after guards failed to take his request seriously.
When teaching entrepreneurial strategies and values, there are a couple things I always advise folks to look out for: the unintentional illicit double entendre and unoriginal borrowing of other people's ideas. And for reasons I won't get into today, religious enterprises seem especially inclined toward both.
Today's example:
The double entendre is obvious, accentuated by the strategic placement of fallen leaves in the woman's lap as if to focus attention on where the fire will start. The first question that popped into my mind when I saw this picture was, "Isn't abstinence supposed to prevent that??"
The second problem is more systemic. From Godtube to blatant trademark ripoffs, Christianity is fostering a horrible reputation for unethical appropriations of others' intellectual property. Commercial companies have by-and-large held back from filing lawsuits, no doubt in large part due to fear of a Christian consumer backlash. Can U Believe It? only adds fuel to the fire, blatantly ripping the business model and interface design of popular user-created t-shirt site Threadless.
As this Mediabistro article indicates, resentment toward this practice is growing and at some point we'll hit the tipping point. Or to put it in more theme-appropriate language, "Repent, for the judgment of law is at hand."
Looking for the ideal way to commemorate Mitt Romney's speech on freedom of religion and his Latter Day faith? How about this First Amendment Lager t-shirt from Wasatch and Squatters Beers, a Salt Lake City brewers cooperative whose other labels include Polygamy Porter, Evolution Amber Ale and of course, Brigham's Brew!
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Jewelry kills.
At least that's the message one might take away from university policies on wearing jewelry during sporting events. Consider the following excerpt from Northeastern, in which Kafkaesque layers of bureaucracy serve to discourage devout bling-bearers from wearing religious jewelry while playing intramural sports:
In a high profile case in South Africa, a court has cited religious & cultural freedom as grounds for allowing a fifteen-year-old girl of South Indian descent to wear a nose stud to school:
The nose stud story made headlines in 2004 when Navaneetham Pillay's daughter, a pupil at the school, returned from holiday wearing a nose stud.
When the school enquired, Pillay said her family was of South Indian descent and that they had decided to maintain a cultural identity by following traditions.
She said in the olden days, young women from that country had their noses pierced upon maturing, to show that they were eligible for marriage.
Although she conceded that the reasoning was no longer applicable, Pillay said her family still used the tradition to honour their daughters as responsible young adults.
She said her daughter was to have her gold stud replaced by a diamond one when she turned 16.
The stud was to be replaced by the girl's grandmother as part of a religious ritual to honour and bless her.
She said the ritual was a way in which the elders of the household bestowed worldly goods, including jewellery, upon young women.
The Gospels tell how Jesus fought for the sanctity of the temple by overthrowing the tables of merchants and moneychangers. Two thousand years later, people are using religious jewelry to circumvent legal limits on commercial activity in public space.
Case in point: Union Square in New York City. Over the past few years, the southern end has gradually become an arts and crafts market. And if you look more closely, you'll notice that a good portion of the vendors sell religious jewelry and other art, as well as items with political slogans.
This article from a local community paper explains how sellers are trying to use the First Amendment to get around vending restrictions. Below: an excerpt that illustrates the key issues.
Vending near the Two Susans by the Gandhi statue on a recent Wednesday afternoon, Miriam W. also hasn’t had it easy selling her miniartwork, which are made of her own paintings and photos, shrunken to fit inside metal miniframes. She declined to give her last name, noting, “They’re already after me.”
“They” are the Park Enforcement Patrol officers, one of whom gave her a $250 ticket for hawking her stamp-size art, feeling it was jewelry, which isn’t protected as expressive content under the First Amendment that can be sold on streets or in parks.
“I told him it was artwork. He said, ‘Artwork I don’t see — I only see pins,’ ” Miriam recalled. The Environmental Control Board judge who reviewed her ticket also saw things differently from her.
“The judge admitted it was artwork — but said because it has a loop on it, it’s jewelry,” Miriam said. But Miriam says the loop is so people can hang the miniart on the wall — or, yes, even wear it if they choose on a necklace or pinned to their shirt or blouse. “Even if this was jewelry, it has artwork in it,” Miriam explained. “I’m seeing it as my artwork first, jewelry second, and the judge is seeing it as jewelry first and artwork second.”
She’s contesting the ticket in court. Meanwhile, hoping to get the PEP’s off her back, she’s added framed, normal-size prints of her own photos and art to her table and also miniartworks of a political nature — with anti-Bush and antiwar logos, for example — and with religious content, such as a portrait of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, and Judeo-Christian symbols, that she hopes will more clearly be recognized as First Amendment protected.
As much spiritual jewelry as there is in the world, for some families it will never be enough. Last week a federal court approved the final allocation of museum funds as part of the settlement in the Gold Train case, in which U.S. soldiers took for themselves jewelry and other items that the Nazis had seized from Hungarian Jews. For more on the history behind this case, check out this government report and hungariangoldtrain.org.
Cross jewelry from the Officially Licensed Passion of the Christ Collection. For more on the consulting guru who shaped the marketing push behind the Passion, check out the article on Larry Ross in today's New York Times Magazine.