How the Turkey Got Its Name
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! As you work your way through the (somewhat mythical) tryptophans, here’s a nugget to chew from the History News Network: Why Is Our Thanksgiving Bird Called a Turkey? (Answer: Because, of course, it came from Turkey). A taste (it’s wafer thin!):
But if the turkey is as American as motherhood and apple pie, why for god’s sake is the name of this bird the same as the name of a vast and important country in the Middle East? Not just any country, mind you. Turkey — the proud nation we know today — was the seat of the Ottoman Empire, the largest and most powerful political realm the western world has known since the decline and fall of Rome . . . .
How the American bird we know as turkey got the moniker “turkey” and not huexoloti (Aztec) or guajolote (Mexican) — authentic early American names for American turkeys — has much to do with the fact that Turkey was the center of the world at the time Christian Europeans began taking a few baby steps toward finding an alternative route to India . . . .
To anyone who knows IP law, the title of this post looks like either ignorance or craziness. I assure you, it’s not ignorance. Everyone knows that one of the distinguishing features between copyrights and patents is that patents require novelty and nonobviousness, and copyrights don’t. All you need to get a copyright is to have an “original” work of authorship — and “originality” is an extremely low threshold. It doesn’t require that the content be new, and it certainly doesn’t require that it be nonobvious; it only requires that it be yours (that is, “original” to you).
Law professors, and particularly law school deans, love to complain about the law school rankings done every year by U.S. News & World Report. (Unless their school rises in the rankings, in which case they are an objective measure of merit.) It’s been pretty well demonstrated that, more than a decade into the rankings project, the primary thing the U.S. News rankings measure is how well the school did on previous years’ rankings. In other words, there’s a massive feedback loop going on that is difficult for any one school to break out of. Nevertheless, schools try, because students and even professors, despite their complaints, rely on the rankings to evaluate the worth of various schools.