At 3:02 AM 2/24/96, Timothy C. May wrote:

I can only hope that someone soon trademarks the stupid "e$" and thus enjoins the rest of us from using it.

Or, as Mr. May has said in the past, "the excrable" e$. ;-).

(On a serious note, yet another example that the American copyrighting and patenting engine is overrevving.)

Say "amen", somebody. Actually, *I* seem to be the unfortunate wretch who coined (ahem...) the term "e$", as it refers to a dollar digitally spent on the internet. My apologies to those spenders of yen, marks, and pounds. I hope I can take some solice in the notion that all money's fungible. :-). In addition, there's no reason not to use e¥, or e£, if people can read your character maps. One of the reasons I chose e$ is that I believe $ is way down deep in the ASCII character set, and thus most machines will display it. Ethnocentrism and potential trademark enfringements aside, a bit of pronounciation may be useful here: when I see "e$" alone in text, I say "e-money" (again, my apologies), and when I see "e$10.00", I say "ten e-dollars". Speaking of trademarks, I had hoped that by using "e$" everywhere that we could avoid such legal mechanations, in the same vein that various mathematical notation schemes cannot be copyrighted (I think). For the lawyers out there, is it possible to do the equivalent of a GNU GPL "copy-left" with a potential trademark like "e$"? If it is, I'd like to do that. Ubiquity is power, and all that, "excrable" symbols and all... <PlugMode-on> Anyone interested in discussing trends in, or the consequences (economic, social or otherwise) of *financial* cryptography on public networks, is cordially invited to subscribe to the e$ mail list. Send "subscribe e$" in the body of a message to majordomo@thumper.vmeng.com, and, after you've subscribed, introduce yourself! The list is unmoderated. <PlugMode-off> Cheers, Bob Hettinga (e$mpressario) ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/