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Russian Hopes To Cash In On Emoticons 213

drewmoney writes "According to a BBC article, Entrepreneur Oleg Teterin said the trademark for the ';-)' emoticon was granted to him by Russia's federal patent agency. 'Legal use will be possible after buying an annual licence from us,' he was quoted by the newspaper Kommersant as saying. 'It won't cost that much — tens of thousands of dollars,' added the businessman, who is president of Superfone, a company that sells advertising on mobile phones. The president of Russian social networking site odnoklassniki.ru, Nikita Sherman said: 'You're not likely to find any retards in Russia who'll pay Superfone for the use of emoticons.'" Teterin may have gotten the idea by catching up on some old news about Despair, Inc., which in May 2000 was awarded a US trademark on the "frowny" emoticon (Slashdot story).

Comment Re:From reading Techdirt... (Score 1) 729

The issue here has almost nothing to do with supply and demand (albeit it has an implicit effect on that stated). The issue here *is* the fact that in order to sell software in this day in age, you must be producing software with an edge. That is, if you are creating an algorithm, make sure that your algorithm cannot be copied or reproduced by a college student. Your product is not worth my money to buy the product if this is true. I give Google and Microsoft as examples. Open-source is a very volatile field, software as well. Let's just put it this way, if you are thriving on extensions and profits of those extensions (at the same time failing to gain profits), then you need to move on to another strategy. Nobody will by the product is they know there is a better free version around, so you must either make a version that is faster and better than the free version or get out of the market.

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