Sep 30, 2009

Just while we are happily travelling in the US of A, a well placed strike at our legs was undertaken in order to dislodge us.

(Oh how they love to hack away at our legs when they think we are not in a position to strike back)

This time suddenly all of our products listed on ebay that contain the word "orgonite" in their description were struck fro the listing by Ebay on insistence of one Karl Welz who claims he has trademarked the word "orgonite".

Most people here in his network  have probaly never heard his name and that says something about the validity of his claim to fame, doesn't it.

We and also Don Croft have always given him credit for first having used this term, but basically it's a variation of the generic term Orgone, first introduced around 1942 by Wilhelm Reich.   Adding the recognised English suffix -ite doesn't make it less generic, does it? 

It's a pity that Karl Welz never followed the invitation to share his experience in an open source network like all of us orgone warriors here do. He was invited with an open heart. Now he's chosen to be a miserly little man, fighting a thing that has become bigger than he can possibly comprehend. Karlie, your in above your league here!

As far as I remember, talk of his alleged trademark started a few years after Orgonite had become a widely used generic term in the orgone network, then mostly concentrated on Stuart Jackson's old Cloudbuster Forum.

Here's some more on the subject or fair usage of terms like Orgonite:

From: www.publaw.com/fairusetrade.html

A trademark owner by choosing a descriptive term as its trademark must live with the result that an author remains free to write about or use the trademark in its “primary“ or descriptive sense. Legal doctrine defines fair use of a trademark as the “reasonable and good faith use of a descriptive term that is another’s trademark to describe rather than to identify the user’s goods, services or business“.’

From the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition:

Orgone . . . In the psychoanalytical theory of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a vital energy or life force which supposedly informs the universe and can be collected and stored in an orgone accumulator or box for subsequent use in the treatment of mental and physical illnesses. Also attrib. . . .

—ite, suffix

. . . 2. b. Mineral. The systematic ending of the names of mineral species, comprising names of ancient origin . . . and a vast number of modern names in which -ite is added to an element expressing colour, structure, physical characters or affinities, or to the name of a locality, discoverer, mineralogist, distinguished scientist, or other person whom the discoverer may have desired to commemorate. Examples are albite, azurite, melanite, dichroite, grphite, apatite, calcite, syenite, labradorite, leadhillite, humbodtite, wemerite, brewsterite, danaite, darwinite. Earlier names of minerals have in some cases been displaced by names in -ite, and some names with other endings as -ane, -in, etc. have been conformed to the -ite type. . . .

Our presence on ebay has been an ongoing experiment. It represents only about 15% of our business but costs me almost half my energy. We have been harassed there from the beginning and it doesn't seem to end any time soon.

Thank god, our main webshop is open for business.

Georg