Caterpillar Now Going After All The Cats For Trademark Cancellations
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A couple of weeks back, we discussed the story of Caterpillar Inc., famous manufacturers of tractor equipment, deciding to bully Cat & Cloud Coffee, makers of you'll-never-guess-what, all because the former had long ago trademarked "CAT" as a truncated brand. At issue specifically is Cat & Cloud's use of the word "cat" on clothing and merchandise it sells, with Caterpillar claiming there is the potential for public confusion with its own clothing and merch lines. This is, of course, plainly ridiculous. There is no overlap in the branding and nobody is going to confuse the tractor folks with the coffee folks.Others pointed out that there are tons of other companies out there that sell apparel and/or merch while holding trademarks that incorporate the word "cat." If those other companies are allowed to exist, why not Cat & Cloud? Caterpillar Inc. heard you dear friends, but its response is probably not the one you were hoping for.According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, Cat & Cloud is among 174 registered trademarks including the word "cat". Caterpillar has filed 125 cancellation petitions so far including one to internet sensation Keyboard Cat. You may have been one of the 150-million viewers of the viral video of a feline, clad in a blue shirt, playing the piano.Charlie Schmidt, Creator of Keyboard Cat and www.keyboardcat.com spoke to us about his ordeal."I'm just a poor artist trying to you know, maintain my integrity! Who wants to hurt a tractor company just by having a cat!?" So, yeah, Caterpillar has expanded its trademark bullying out to encompass more small businesses. It is again defending its actions by saying they are only targeted for apparel trademarks, but that still isn't good enough. It's virtually impossible to believe that all 125 trademarks for the apparel in question comprise uses that would actually cause any real public confusion. Instead, this is obviously a corporate legal team pulling out the legal shotgun and just spraying buckshot everywhere it can.For Cat & Cloud, at least, its story is getting some public attention.Customers including tech titan Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist for Apple and current Chief Evangelist for Canva, is getting behind the café, leveraging his millions of online followers to join the effort."Sometimes you have to stand up for something. For the principal of it. And this is one of those times."Actress Sophia Bush has also weighed in on Instagram to help Cat & Cloud. Now we just have to marshal forces for the hundred-plus other victims of Caterpillar's bullying, I suppose.
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posted at: 12:00am on 21-Jun-2019
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Google CEO Admits That It's Impossible To Moderate YouTube Perfectly; CNBC Blasts Him
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Over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave an interview to CNN in which he admitted to exactly what we've been screaming over and over again for a few years now: it's literally impossible to do content moderation at scale perfectly. This is for a variety of reasons: first off, no one agrees what is the "correct" level of moderation. Ask 100 people and you will likely get 100 different answers (I know this, because we did this). What many people think must be mostly "black and white" choices actually has a tremendous amount of gray. Second, even if there were clear and easy choices to make (which there are not), at the scale of most major platforms, even a tiny error rate (of either false positives or false negatives) will still be a very large absolute number of mistakes.So Pichai's comments to CNN shouldn't be seen as controversial, so much as they are explaining how large numbers work:"It's one of those things in which let's say we are getting it right over 99% of the time. You'll still be able to find examples. Our goal is to take that to a very, very small percentage, well below 1%," he added. This shouldn't be that complex. YouTube's most recent stats say that over 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Assuming, conservatively, that the average YouTube video is 5 minutes (Comscore recently put the number at 4.4 minutes per video) that means around 6,000 videos uploaded every minute. That means about 8.6 million videos per day. And somewhere in the range of 250 million new videos in a month. Now, let's say that Google is actually 99.99% "accurate" (again, a non-existent and impossible standard) in its content moderation efforts. That would still mean ~26,000 "mistakes" in a month. And, I'm sure, eventually some people could come along and find 100 to 200 of those mistakes and make a big story out of how "bad" Google/YouTube are at moderating. But, the issue is not so much the quality of moderation, but the large numbers.Anyway, that all seems fairly straightforward, but of course, because it's Google, nothing is straightforward, and CNBC decided to take this story and spin it hyperbolicly as Google CEO Sundar Pichai: YouTube is too big to fix. That, of course, is not what he's saying at all. But, of course, it's already being picked up on by various folks to prove that Google is obviously too big and needs to be broken up.Of course, what no one will actually discuss is how you would solve this problem of the law of large numbers. You can break up Google, sure, but unless you think that consumers will suddenly shift so that not too many of them use any particular video platform, whatever leading video platforms there are will always have this general challenge. The issue is not that YouTube is "too big to fix," but simply that any platform with that much content is going to make some moderation mistakes -- and, with so much content, in absolute terms, even if the moderation efforts are pretty "accurate" you'll still find a ton of those mistakes.I've long argued that a better solution is for these companies to open up their platforms to allow user empowerment and competition at the filtering level, so that various 3rd parties could effectively "compete" to see who's better at moderating (and to allow end users to opt-in to what kind of moderation they want), but that's got nothing to do with a platform being "too big" or needing "fixing." It's a recognition that -- as stated at the outset -- there is no "right" way to moderate content, and no one will agree on what's proper. In such a world, having a single standard will never make sense, so we might as well have many competing ones. But it's hard to see how that's a problem of being "too big."
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