Some years back there was a salmonella outbreak where the source had been narrowed down to onions, jalapenos, or tomatoes. I’d had a weeks-long craving for homemade guacamole and pico de gallo, so finally I went charging into the grocery store all I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE THINGS THAT PLEASE ME, bought all my shit, made…

counterpoint: chipotle sucks

I haz the dumb.

If I want to burn my property, that’s well within my rights because it’s my property. If DNC is burning the trademarks because it’s pissed about losing the bid, that’s well within their rights as the owner of the trademarks. It might not be a smart business move. They’d probably be better off negotiating a price and…

Obviously they have some value if people are getting outraged over them. Not $50m worth of value, given that the change is going through, but some value certainly.

$51 million for the IP rights when Aramark will be able to capitalize on those rights for the next 15 years minimum, and DN’s bid for the concession in 1993 is worth $115 million in today’s dollars, including the IP rights?

They made a bad business deal. That happens. But it’s not a crisis of our country.

Dude has to be a rep for NPS or something. The stuff he is saying is either propaganda or outright fabrications.

I don’t think that you’re correct that DNC will not win the fight. Here are the facts as described by the page linked in the article:

So Delaware North lost the contract to operate the hotels to Aramark, however, they still own the “names” to the hotels, names which have some level of cachet and value. I still don’t see what the issue is.

This is not a Libertarian or dick issue. Clegane is right in this case. The NPS forced DN to buy the intellectual property 20 years ago as part of taking over concessions. Now the NPS has chosen a new vendor and DN is saying “so buy the rights from us that you required us to buy when we got the contract”. Sure, they…

This literally happens all the time in business, especially with hotels.

The Waldorf-Astoria name is owned by Hilton. You best be sure if Hilton wanted to offload those hotels and/or the name, they’d charge a premium precisely because of the cachet the Waldorf-Astoria name and brand has. This is precisely why Hilton…

This actually highlights one of the major problems with “intellectual property”. It is this concept that you can patent anything that comes out of your head. I’m a software developer and while many seem to think it would protect people in my field it really really doesn’t. All it allows people to do is to take simple,…

What you typed just made no sense. One company bought the rights to the names/trademarks. That company was pushed out. Now, to use its trademarks, it wants compensation. This is normal.

I tried really (kinda) hard to care about this whole thing. For some reason I can’t muster the level of outrage Alissa can. I’m more pissed off that her greedy, capitalist bosses at Gawker offshored their company to The Caymans to avoid millions in taxes. But hey, they’re lefties.

I’m not getting the outrage. Hotels change names all the time when a new company buys them, usually because they’re named after the company that owns, but sometimes not.

This is a frightening peek into our Branded™ and overly litigious future.

The elections in 2008 and 2012 mean fuck all when the House of Delegates is elected in off and off off year elections that those voters don’t turn out for. The Virginia House is possibly the most garbage gerrymandered map in the country, but it got that way because not enough people vote.

Huh... I didn’t realize 30% of black people undergo spontaneous slavery.

Morgan Freeman.