An online enthusiast's site for the Mini brand from BMW has been placed under legal assault by BMW for trademark infringement. According to Mark Ferguson, the founder of MiniCooperOnline (MCO), BMW basically wants him out of business, as it wants to tightly control any commercial ventures associated with the Mini (including the enthusiast aftermarket). Basically, he can run the site as a hobby, they say–or run it without the word “Mini” in its name.

BMW may well be within its rights, as deliniated by the DMCA at least. And commercial publications that use the name of a trademarked product in their name (like Visual Studio Magazine, Nintendo Power, Playstation Magazine) typically have to negotiate a license in order to do so.

But MCO does have some legs to stand on here. Other “independent” online publications have been able to use brand names in their titles, since they have established themselves as independent . Take Microsoft Watch, Mary Jo Foley's newsletter and weblog that covers Microsoft's maneuverings. It runs a legal disclaimer: “Microsoft Watch is an independent publication, not affiliated with or authorized by Microsoft Corporation.
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BMW's legal team also seems to be muddying the waters as far as what they really hope to achieve, by dictating what domain names Ferguson can use, and then retracting those names in the next breath.

And they may just be shooting themselves in the foot in the process. The move just may piss off loyal owners and reduce BMW's sell-through of parts, and leave a bad taste in the mouths of many who would have been otherwise part of a grassroots marketing machine.

It's ironic, because BMW has been trying to engineer a deliberate grassroots approach to marketing the Mini from the beginning, focusing on “street teams” and other forms of nontraditional marketing to build early demand. Now, they've let loose the legal hounds to prevent anyone else from driving that demand and profiting from it. But trademark protection is growing weaker daily, and BMW might just completely hose the Mini brand in the process of bullying alleged infringers.

After all, the term “mini” has been widely used generically. Maybe if enough people start calling smaller versions of their products “Mini”, the value of the brand name will be diluted and the trademark will be placed on questionable ground. Maybe BMW will find itself in the same position as Fox News, with its trademark in danger of being snatched away from it by the court.

A frequent criticism of the statistics used by the gun control lobby and folks like Michael Moore use is that the huge disparity in gun deaths in the US vs the rest of the world doesn't take other violence in those countries into account, and doesn't weight the numbers against population. So there, nyah nyah nyah.

Well, here are those numbers, thanks to School of Social Science at UC Irvine's Peace Monitor program.

And guess what? The US still sucks when it comes to violence. You're less likely to get whacked in Uruguay than here.

Americans are more than twice as likely (at 7.9 violent deaths per 100,000 people) to be killed in an act of violence as, say, Canadians (who get offed violently at a rate of 2.7 per 100k), and are still way ahead of Japan (2.0) and England and Wales (which, at 4.2, is even more dangerous than Northern Ireland which rates a 3.4). Even Cuba, with 7.6 offings per 100k, is marginally safer.

But there's a place where violence is ten times as bad as it is here–where 77.4 people per 100k come to a bloody end. And that place is…the Russian Federation. Running a distant second is the Phillipines, which has a violent death rate of 58.1 per 100k. (Israel, by comparison, ranks at 8.3 per 100k–placing it just ahead of Poland and the US).

Wanna live someplace safe? Try Norway, with 1.2 violent deaths per 100k population.

Now, it's concievable that there are places that are even worse than Russia–these numbers are based on data from the World Health Organization mortality database, which only covers 66 countries thoroughly.

But somehow, having just a tenth of the violence of Russia–which has a civil war going on with Chechnya–strikes me as faint praise for American civility.
The only European countries with higher violent death rates than the US are Poland, Portugal (with 15.6/100k! Yikes!), the Republic of Moldova and the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).

By the way, in 2000, my home town of Baltimore had a murder rate of 40.3 per 100,000, which would place it in the #4 position on the world chart if taken separately from the rest of the US–right behind Venezuela.

Now, just because I'm pointing this out doesn't mean I'm for gun control (well, not in the conventional sense, at least). I think the problem is rooted elsewhere… but that's another post.