permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Title: Re: permaculture trademark alert

A bit belatedly I'd like to mention that my reason for going into detail earlier about my copyright tiff with Bill and Lisa Mollison was only in small part simply to vent my spleen publicly about a frustrating and disappointing experience. Only a little. My main reason was to provide evidence that the efforts to secure trademark, in my opinion, are not motivated by a benign desire on their part to simply protect permaculture from corruption or to uphold high standards. For years I felt Bill's assertions of copyright were unselfish, and I often leapt to Bill's defense about this issue. But my experience, and those related to me privately by many others, have shown me I was wrong. 

on 7/12/01 5:39 PM,  Ken Little wrote:

> i feel that trademarking PC etc is a good way of grounding what has been developed so far but i wish to restate my opinion that it should be the movement as a whole that do this rather than a few indiviuals

And that's precisely my concern. Trademarking "Permaculture Design Course" gives the owner of the term absolute control over who may use that term commercially. Everyone who has taught Pc for years would now have to apply to the Mollisons for approval of their curriculum and for licensing.

Note that the application for trademark is in the individual names of Bill Mollison and Lisa Mollison, not under any organization. It means personal ownership. 

Also, simply because the word "permaculture" may not be trademark-able is no reason to relax. Nike can trademark "Just do it," Coke, "the real thing."  Any novel combination of words associated with a product might be trademarked. This means an objection needs to be lodged on the basis of harm to established tradespeople: everyone who teaches design courses or does permaculture design. However, on the bright side, Russ has mentioned that Intellectual Property Australia points out that
 "[a trademark] must not be a sign that other traders may wish to use to promote or describe their goods and services."

and that it is difficult to create trademark that describes a known service such as "electrician."  I would think "permaculture designer' falls under that heading.  

Graham wrote:
>Would he be insisting that UK PC teachers also follow designers manual
>curriculum to the letter?

I can't speculate on what's in Bill's head, but trademarking would allow him to do just that. Bill has stated in a letter to my publisher that the DM serves as the curriculum, and I think that is an unattainably broad definition. It means that a proposed curriculum could be rejected if any bit of the DM was omitted, and that would allow a good deal of personal judgment or bias to be used in the decision to grant a license. As I mentioned, some very experienced and effective Pc teachers have had their curricula rejected. Maybe people could just submit the DM as our curriculum, and then teach whatever they choose in the courses. That was how Bill ran the course I took from him. He's a brilliant teacher, but he didn't adhere to the curriculum. 

It seems quite contradictory for Bill on one hand to say that he wants others to create new work and not just parrot his own, and on the other to insist that any teachers follow his curriculum to the letter.

Russ has mentioned having a set of different curricula, each appropriate to different environments. This is a fine idea, and, at least in the US, is what has evolved informally. The courses taught in the desert SW are very different from what we teach in the maritime NW; the urban course I co-taught last spring had a hugely different focus than the rural course I co-taught last winter. They all contain the basic elements: patterning, design methods, animals, guilds, etc, but hold very different specifics, particularly in the invisible structures section.


Russ Grayson wrote:
>> This . . . is the
>> means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art."
> 
> Forgive me if I am wrong... but isn't this the means by which permaculture
> itself appears to have been formulated?

Yes, and this and the other good points you raised in your email are precisely why my publisher and I ignored the Mollison's legal threats. Bill has made a tremendous contribution to humanity by assembling all the elements of permaculture, and has added his own ideas to it (such as his particular design of herb spirals, which he says he invented). But the assembly is the novel part, not the information in Pc. Anyone is free to repeat this information and to build on it.

Toby