
The Slants Win Supreme Court Battle Over Band's Name - gnicholas
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/19/533514196/the-slants-win-supreme-court-battle-over-bands-name-in-trademark-dispute
======
gnicholas
More detailed legal analyses, including repercussions for the Redskins case
and controversies regarding hate speech, from the Volokh Conspiracy:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/the-slants-and-the-redskins-win-the-government-cant-
deny-full-trademark-protection-to-allegedly-racially-offensive-marks/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-
speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/)

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headcanon
In the polarized and racially tense environment we find ourselves in, I wonder
how the supreme court would have ruled had the band members not been Asian
American. Personally, given the circumstances and the intentions of the band
members, it feels ridiculous that the government would have refused to
trademark the name, however I'm sure a lot of people would feel differently if
it was a white supremacist band named something egregiously racist towards
minorities.

I'm sure some alt-right types will take full advantage of this decision to do
what they do best - troll

~~~
openasocket
I don't think it would. The justices are smart people, they know full well the
precedent they have set can be used by white supremacists et al. Their
decision explicitly affirms that hate speech is not exempt from First
Amendment protections.

As an aside, this is why the judicial system is probably my favorite branch of
government. Debates in Congress are not real debates; congressman are using
them to score political points, not convince the other side of their argument.
Same with the executive branch, it's all about re-election which means they
have to concern themselves with the optics of their actions. Only in the
judicial branch do we at least try to make decisions based on reason and
rational argument. It's how we got legal interracial marriage at a time when
something like 90% of the population thought it was immoral. The justices
don't care about the optics of the case, only the facts, because establishing
a precedence means these decisions can have broad consequences.

~~~
ErikVandeWater
Lots of people in this thread are equating smarts to a lack of inherent human
bias. I agree that there is a relationship there, but if you read enough
cases, you get the feeling they often stretch to get to the conclusion they
had (knowingly or unknowingly) predetermined.

~~~
openasocket
Oh justices are absolutely biased, it's impossible to have a human being who
isn't. The point is that the justices have to defend their decision with some
sort of rational argument, while congressman simply vote yay or nay on a bill
without qualifiers or precedent being set.

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joezydeco
For backstory, here's NPR's Planet Money podcast about the situation prior to
the SCOTUS ruling:

[http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...](http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=530252213)

------
devy
Kudos to ACLU for fighting a good fight. This excerpt from their official
statement[1] sums it up pretty well.

    
    
         Censorship doesn’t just violate the First Amendment — 
         it often doesn’t produce its intended results. As many 
         activists who lived through the civil rights era, or 
         protested in the streets just this past year, could tell
         you: Restrictions on free speech are often applied most 
         stringently against groups trying to challenge the 
         status quo.
    

[1]: [https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/victory-slants-are-
of...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/victory-slants-are-officially-
rock-stars-first-amendment)

------
LordKano
If N.W.A could be trademarked, I don't understand how anyone thought it was
right to deny The Slants.

~~~
Trill-I-Am
Would their trademark have been the full name spelled out or is it literally
"N.W.A.?" I'd imagine that would have previously made a big difference.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Well if it was written out would it matter? In general free speach should be
absolute (yelling fire in a packed movieis not). It does not matter if someone
thinks the speech is offensive. If that was the case can we ban Fox News?
Conan sense won here, for once.

~~~
delazeur
> Well if it was written out would it matter?

Yes, if N.W.A had been used as a precedent to support the Slants it would
matter whether or not N.W.A. was written out. The more fundamental question of
whether slurs _should_ be protected is separate from the precedential question
of whether slurs _have been_ protected in the past.

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vilhelm_s
The set of concurring opinions already gives me a headache.

> ALITO, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of
> the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III–A, in which ROBERTS, C. J.,
> and KENNEDY, GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined, and in
> which THOMAS, J., joined except for Part II, and an opinion with respect to
> Parts III–B, III–C, and IV, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS and BREYER,
> JJ., joined. KENNEDY, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring
> in the judgment, in which GINSBURG, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.
> THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the
> judgment. GORSUCH, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the
> case.

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hamburglar1
This is a win for a free society

~~~
coldpie
I dunno, I think it's something about which reasonable people can disagree.
It's not a free speech question, it's an intellectual property rights
question. Should the government provide IP coverage for potentially offensive
product names? Apparently, yes, but I don't think opponents are very far out
on a limb, either.

~~~
Kalium
It's an intellectual property law question based on the emotional reactions of
people to speech. It's possible that this is both a free speech case and an
intellectual property rights case.

Do we want to be in a society where only things deemed non-offensive are
protected? Seems maybe a little arbitrary and capricious?

Personally, I'd rather ditch most IP entirely, but that's rather a different
issue.

~~~
kefka
> Do we want to be in a society where only things deemed non-offensive are
> protected?

Well, offensive to whom? There's obviously "Nigger"... But wait. It's
offensive if a white person calls a black person that. But many a time, blacks
will call each other that to 'own' the word and reclaim its power. So we have
an immediate example of an offensive word that isn't offensive in many cases.

Or in recent years, simply asking "Are you a man or woman?" is offensive if
they pull the 'not gender binary'-card. Yeah, we can ignore the fact that you
either have sperm or eggs, or genetic anomalies that have interesting medical
conditions.. But the question in certain groups is "Offensive".

Then there's the last group of people who are, what I call, professional
victims. I've not seen a conservative one of these yet. They primarily are in
the extremist liberal camps, and the smallest innocuous things will set them
off in tirades. To them, everything they don't do is "Offensive". And this
"Offensiveness" changes as per person. I usually treat these people by
ignoring them. You cannot win. (An example of one of them is demanding to have
others use some pronoun like hir or zir or zem. And they will get angry if you
ask, don't ask, use a different one around other people or... )

Edit: I try for a variant of the Robustness Principle. Unless someone is
intentionally mocking me, if they get some term wrong or use no longer
"politically correct" terminology, I try to look past that for their
underlying idea.

~~~
msie
_I 've not seen a conservative one of these yet._

Ive seen plenty of them. They rail against any sign of diversity as an attack
on their white, heterosexual normalcy. Check out the forums on IGN. They are
outraged by the sight of a penis in a tv show (American Gods) or a person of
colour cast in a leading role.

~~~
kefka
Well, point made.

I've seen a bit of these types, but usually they wore iron cross rings, or
white robes (KKK). Even some of the more extremist Christians I know haven't
acted quite like that. Yes their preference is very much against homosexuality
and more liberal policies of "Do what you want as long as you don't harm
others", but I haven't seem them go out of their way like the extremist
liberal ones do.

I've even been screamed at by some extremist liberal woman because I (a male
<shudder>) dared to walk through a door and hold the door open for her, err,
hir, err, "it". And note, even if you can't see it, am a bisexual male.

~~~
sanderjd
Your comments here are ironic because while claiming to have only ever
witnessed "professional victims" on the progressive side, you're displaying
the conservative version of the same thing. You don't recognize that's what it
is, you just think you have legitimate complaints about how you've been
treated due to your identity. That's exactly what the people on the other side
think as well.

~~~
yebyen
I think you just said that anyone who was ever "victimized" by a professional
victim is, themselves, a professional victim.

I want to believe that's not what you're saying, but I'm having a hard time
parsing something different out of your comment.

~~~
sanderjd
What you're missing is that I don't think that there is such a thing as a
"professional victim". I think it is just a term some people use to
delegitimize any slights perceived by the "other side".

~~~
yebyen
That's a perfectly reasonable point and position to take but at the same time,
I think I could point at some professional victims and you'd concede that they
are them.

Like the guy who goes to places and gets himself into horrible situations on
YouTube Live or Twitch, when people call in a Swat Team onto his location.

And I don't even know anything about his politics, I just know that he has a
following, and he literally makes (was making?) money off of his streams,
which people were attracted to based on wanting to see harm come to him!

Literally inconveniencing airplanes and airport concourses full of people so
that he could get some more media attention on his scam.

So, I think that's despicable and I've never looked up his streams as a
result, because I don't want him to profit. Like I said I don't even know his
politics, and I won't say anything about mine.

But to argue the singular point, I think there are some professional victims
and it is well... dismissive, to be dismissive of them.

~~~
sanderjd
That seems like a different definition of "professional victim" than the one
implied up-thread.

~~~
yebyen
I guess maybe, but I don't think that advertising revenues or even actual cash
values are a necessary component of "profit." Different people do things for
different reasons.

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chrisbennet
I heard a podcast about this and the singer of the Slants said by naming the
band that, they were "reclaiming" the disparaging word.

~~~
slantyyz
It begs to ask the question "who is the word really disparaging to"?

I grew up in Canada in the 70s, and was called all sorts of epithets, and
"slant" isn't even remotely the most disparaging of the things I've been
called.

Note my handle as well -- I've been using a variant of it for 30+ years. A
white guy gave me the handle "slant" in the mid 80s during the BBS days... and
yes, it had something to do with my ethnicity. But I wasn't offended, and
decided to own it.

Fast forward to the 90s, and the word "slant" was too common to be able take
as an alias anywhere on the Internet, so I innocently added the suffix "YYZ"
(the three letter code for Toronto's Pearson International Airport). I didn't
even realize for a few years that it phonetically sounded like "Slanty Eyes"
until a friend pointed it out.

I've been lucky to not get any flack for my handle in most places, with the
exception of one instance. Some of a white friend's twitter friends (also
white) saw a twitter conversation I had with him and told him to tell me they
found my name offensive. Which I found to be incredibly bizarre.

\-- edited fixed grammar issue

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Some of a white friend's twitter friends (also white) saw a twitter
> conversation I had with him and told him to tell me they found my name
> offensive. Which I found to be incredibly bizarre.

It's another form of this:

[http://imgur.com/aqnfsVa](http://imgur.com/aqnfsVa)

I have a white friend who is extremely sensitive about the word "nigger". So
much that he wouldn't join a black person's Discord server named "The Real
Niggaz" and got upset that someone in a game had the name "TheNiddaSteve".
That's not a typo. Nidda. He was upset about "Nidda" because he believed they
really meant "nigga".

~~~
Retra
Turns out that that the human brain doesn't seem to make a strong distinction
between the meanings of words and the determination of the appropriateness of
words used in context (i.e., their moral value.) Understanding this has taught
me a lot about human behavior.

Or maybe it's just primed me to expect certain kinds of misunderstandings.

------
6stringmerc
On the one hand, this is a great win for Freedom of Speech in the United
States as it relates to commerce, and on the other hand, The Slants is a
terrible fucking band name and deserves to be made fun of at every
opportunity. Which, coincidentally, also is a nice Freedom of Speech benefit.
In other news, Radio, Satellite, or Internet broadcasters still not compelled
by law to play their music or mention their name.

~~~
mcbits
What's terrible about it? It's concise, memorable, and apparently nobody else
is using it. Perhaps it's terrible because some people use the word
offensively, like "Queen"?

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ejcx
I am a die hard Redskins fan (if you're in the bay area and want to watch
games with me, reach out).

This is a win for the redskins but I think the majority of us don't care
anymore about the name that strongly. Pretty interesting to see this resolved
though, especially since there was a ton of fake-news when this case first
started about a name change being imminent.

~~~
sarah2079
To me it seems like whether it should be possible to trademark that team name
and whether it's a name the team should feel proud sticking with in 2017 are
two pretty different questions.

I am happy with this legal decision because I don't want the government to be
in charge deciding what is offensive and what's not. I also think it's long
past time for them to pick a new name. Just because they can legally have that
name doesn't mean they should keep it.

~~~
ejcx
I agree with you on all counts. It's hard to get a new name though after 100
years of history. I don't think it will change under Snyder, since the name
recognition is one of the things that makes it one of the most valuable
franchises in all of professional sports.

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joncp
Never go up against a guy named Simon Tam.

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noonespecial
Perfect outcome. In the USA you're free to name your band any stupid,
offensive thing you want... and just as free to make no money selling zero
albums because you offended everyone.

~~~
wang_li
You ever hear a black man call another black man nigger? This band made up of
Asian people wanted to name their band "The Slants."

~~~
liquidise
Constitutionally irrelevant, as the justices are well aware.

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tyingq
The Butthole Surfers were arguably more well known than The Slants. I'm
reasonably sure that the name was a homophobic slur. They appear to have had a
trademark back in the day, since expired/abandoned.

[https://trademarks.justia.com/758/05/butthole-
surfers-758053...](https://trademarks.justia.com/758/05/butthole-
surfers-75805395.html)

