A letter box called Glasnost

If the late Soviet Union had been has trademark happy as the average American or Western European bizniz folks, the recent sanctions against Russia might include that odd line item "royalties for glasnost".

Too fast of a posting start, sorry. Here is the slow version.

Once upon a time, there was a cold, mysterious, kind of feared and kind of ridiculed great land to the east of Europe, to the west of the U.S., an to the north of everybody else.

Too slow now?

Well, there was the land of Santa Claus and the land of Krampus. One day, there appeared a new, gentler Krampus, who shed the hoof and horn image and looked like a bald version of Santa Claus.

Seriously.

This led to new words that needed to be learned by us, one of which was Glasnost, or in Russian гла́сность. Fun fact, the Soviets spoke Russian.

Glasnost was a new policy of transparency and openness, and luckily for us Westerners, the first four letters of the word look much like "glass", that symbol of transparency.

The concept worked but was not trademarked by the Soviets.  Had they done so, they could still cash in on royalties for stuff like the Glasnost series of letter boxes found, here for example.

If you speak Russian or actually clicked the Wikipedia link above - hell no, we are not repeating it here - then you might say, wait.

Glasnost is an old, nice word, why would anybody even think of trademarking an existing word or phrase?

We cannot ask the Soviets, because they obviously failed to think of that. However, we can ask our buddies at the Disney corporation who tried something similar with the Spanish "Dia de los Muertos", which for you and I means "Day of the Dead" and is about the spooky October/November holiday of Christians in Mexico.

While Disney withdrew the trademark filing for that one, it might be a good idea to check if someone has slammed a TM on Glasnost yet.

But to make the time you spent reading this post worthwhile, here is a link to the German Max Planck institute ISP traffic shaping test GLASNOST.

Traffic shaping is not the same as the advertised connection speed. The GLASNOST site allows you to select specific protocols to see if traffic shaping for them is in place (commonly this is done for such nasties as BitTorrent).