IP paralegal, interpreter and translator | langblr, studyblr, lawblr, general workblr - mate, I don’t even know anymore. I founded this blog for translation memes and well… I mean what even is a career? well I sure as hell don’t know, but at least I’m keeping it interesting | capitalism- and hustle-culture-hateblog though | languages English and German, learning some Welsh currently (random, I know) | Follow for some law stuff I guess, bitching about various patent offices (German Patent and Trademark Office and USPTO my beloathed), fresh interpreting and translation memes, linguistic shitposting, MT fails, rants about the shitty state of the German language sector | etc | If you have any questions about interpreting and translation feel free to ask! | I follow from my main @we-are-not-amoosed
So since I’m actually becoming a patent paralegal now, starting in September, I’ve been wondering what I should do with this blog. I obviously still love translation, interpreting and languages and I might come back to the language sector again in the future, but I won’t be focusing on it for the next two years. I’ll probably keep posting and reblogging language stuff, but it’ll likely be less content than in the past. I’ve also thought about posting about my experience of going back to vocational college in my late 20s (it’s surely gonna be weird) and some legal/law firm stuff. So for the next two years at least this blog is probably gonna be a mixture of langblr and lawblr, and less specific stuff about translation and interpreting. Idk if you guys are interested in that, but if you at any point feel that my content here isn’t something you’re interested in anymore, feel free to unfollow; I won’t be mad! (You can also follow my main @we-are-not-amoosed or my queer fandom/Star Trek sideblog @get-the-cheese-to-sickbay if you want to somehow keep up with me without having to follow this blog.) And if you have any suggestions what content you’d like to see in the future, I’d welcome that, too, of course!
I’ve also changed my url from lost-in-interpreting to paralegal-activity (based on “paranormal activity”) to reflect the career change, although what that’ll mean for the blog in particular remains to be seen.
Fun and underrated side effect of companies changing their logo for pride month is exposing raging homophobes apparently
Anyway, this post is brought to you by the one junior lawyer at my firm, who apparently got so offended by the European Patent Office’s pride month logo that he used his law firm email to complain to the EPO, which lead to the general office mailbox being CCed in the EPO’s answer to his stupid rant, which then lead to him being exposed to the entire firm as an ultraconservative homophobe and now the entire office hates him and HR is not amused
Copyright governs who has the "right" to produce and distribute "copies" of books/music/movies/creative works. This is where fair use doctrine applies, because most creative works are referential by nature.
Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.
Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.
A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.
A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.
Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.
Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.
What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).
Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.
In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.
Yes, Pattie's legal fees to fight this will cost more than the $1 she's being sued for. Pattie could also not fight this, withdraw her trademark application, not spend any money, and carry on being an environmental activist drag queen named Pattie Gonia. She would probably be better off making nice with Patagonia in the hopes of a Jan Sport-esque deal where Pattie designs an exclusive fabric and Patagonia maintains the trademark, but apparently Pattie's legal team has been sassing off to Patagonia in their communications for years, has applied for a trademark they should 100% know they'll never get, and has now decided to play the victim on social media just in time for Pride month, so I don't know how likely that is. I guess we'll see!
This is mostly correct, but I’d like to offer a small correction. The product deal with Hydroflask and North Face apparently occurred in 2022, and HydroFlask got Patagonia involved to make sure everything was in the clear. It seems like Patagonia was very agreeable about everything at the time, and only asked that Pattie Gonia and her partners avoid using the Patagonia logo and font or similar images, and to avoid putting the words “Pattie Gonia” on any products. This is the email exchange from 2022, from the recent Patagonia trademark complaint, including Pattie Gonia apparently agreeing to the limitations.
The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.
Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?
It’s possible that Patagonia understood the terms from 2022 to be a good-faith ongoing agreement about keeping the brands separate, and Pattie interpreted it as an agreement limited to the now-ended North Face and Hydroflask collaboration. It’s also possible that Pattie Gonia didn’t believe she was actually agreeing to anything at all, since her responses were very neutral, though positive in tone, up until 2025. The email chain does, however, show what I think is a very clear effort on Patagonia’s part to protect their trademark while also showing support and goodwill towards Pattie in her use of the Pattie Gonia stage persona.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Ich weiß sowieso nicht warum ich Werbung aufgedrückt bekomme, die sich scheinbar an Anwälte richtet (muss an meiner ungeschlagenen Argumentationsweise und meiner schmierigen Frisur liegen), ich wusste aber auch nicht dass wild gewordene Bürohunde so ein Problem in Anwaltskanzleien sind. Ich scheine also allgemein Nachholbedarf im Bereich Jura zu haben
In the spirit of my high school German textbook Wie geht's?, which tried to offer a fun, down-to-Earth, contemporary course in German teaching phrases useful even at the beginner level, I have decided I am going to write a German textbook that will get you started with everything you need to know to function in modern German society. It's going to be called Sie Brauchen Ein Anderes Formular.
Chapter 1: Unterlagen und Anträge will introduce you to that most essential element of German society: filling out paperwork. You'll learn to recognize basic vocabulary like Anschrift, Name und Vorname, Addresse, and Postleitzahl. You'll be introduced to rich German cultural practices, like filling out paperwork. You'll learn to tell delightful jokes, like Haben die diese Informationen nicht schon? and Liest denn niemand mehr seine E-Mails? You'll experience medieval customs which are alive and well in Germany, like mailing paper letters to deal with large organizations, and receiving them in return. And, of course, you will learn to socialize with other Germans while bonding over shared activities, like filling out paperwork.
Chapter 2: Alltägliche Belastigungen will cover going out, getting around, and getting things done. You'll learn how to say außer Betrieb, defekt, and nicht einsatzbereit. You'll learn how to make everyday conversation with phrases like Tut mir leid, mein Zug hatte Verspätung, and Ich habe versucht anzurufen, aber es war ständig besetzt. You'll learn about treasured German folkways like the Schuldenbremse and Investitionsschau. And you'll even learn about German mythology, and the tale of the invisible Digitalisierungsinitiative.
Chapter 3: Das Ist Nicht Richtig will teach you how to flourish in German society. You will learn, of course, that Sie brauchen ein anderes Formular. You'll learn how to say Das steht nicht auf Ihrer Webseite; Nein, wirklich, ich habe nachgeschaut; and Woher hätte ich das bitte wissen sollen?, and to recognize common phrases like Das ist nicht mein Problem and Und was soll ich Ihrer Meinung nach dagegen tun? And you'll learn how to ingratiate yourself with others with phrases like Sie haben Recht, das ist mein Fehler; Sie haben Recht, es ist nicht Ihre Aufgabe, so etwas zu wissen; and Mir ist bewusst, dass es unzumutbar ist, von Ihnen zu verlangen, Ihre Arbeit zu machen.
Chapter 4: Systemversagen will delve deeper into the rich texture of German life. You'll learn about everyday heroes, like Apotheker and Apothekerin who keep dangerous drugs like Paracetamol off the streets. You'll learn to blend in with phrases like Natürlich müssen wir die heimische Autoindustrie schützen, and Atomkraft ist eine Umweltkatastrophe, deshalb müssen wir weiter Kohle abbauen. And you'll learn about important ceremonial practices like Datenschutz, around which all of German society is oriented, though nobody seems to remember why.
Chapter 5: Im Rahmen Bleiben will help you embrace the diversity of German society by mastering the untranslatable art of Angepasstheit. You'll learn how to say Warum willst du das denn?, Das ist doch nicht normal, and Die macht das doch nur, um Aufmerksamkeit zu bekommen. You'll learn how to pass this gift onto others through ungebetene Kritik an Fremden, and why everything has its ordnende gesellschaftliche Funktion and everybody has their part to play.
And after that, I'll start working on my next language textbook: L'Italia Non È Mica Meglio, Ma Almeno Il Tempo È Bello.
forget trying to explain dubstep to a victorian child, try to explain genAI to yourself from ten years ago. they invented predictive text on steroids and people take its words as gospel. ceos fully believe that glorified autocomplete can replace millions of employees and many people are fired or forced to edit machine's vomit. creative fields are in shambles, everything is slop. anyone can publicly make porn of anyone in one click, yes, including children. no, there are no consequences for that. nothing feels real. no one can apparently write an email anymore. I'd have a stroke.
