Trademarks exploit 9/11

By Tim Carman

Capitalism didn't have much time for tears on Sept. 11, 2001. A man from the state of Israel, on the very day of the attacks in New York City and Washington, filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
He wanted to trademark “September 11, 2001.”
He may have been the first to try to capitalize on the numbing events of that day — his application has been given an “initial refusal” — but he wasn't the last. Nearly one year after the airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thousands of people have tried to make a statement or a buck, or both, on what is now simply called 9/11. Including yours truly.
No one really needs to provide us with a laundry list of 9/11-inspired products. Odds are good most of us already own one: a book, a bumper sticker, a pin, a T-shirt, a mouse pad, a gimme cap, a CD or one of those ubiquitous American flags likely manufactured in China. Odds are even better that you've bought or read a special-edition newspaper or a commemorative magazine or watched one of the countless television programs devoted to the events. Maybe you even beefed up security at your home or office.
The ubiquity of these products and services underlines a strange truth about American capitalism: It tends to rush headlong into any commercial endeavor. But the sheer scale and deep emotional scars of 9/11 have left our country's thinkers, executives, investors, musicians, writers, historians, photographer, publishers, marketers and scam artists on some uniquely unstable moral ground. And any time a large number of people venture into such uncharted areas, some are going to get hurt, or criticized, no matter what their intentions.
Ask Bruce Springsteen, who was chastised by a fellow New Jerseyite, Bergen Record columnist Mike Kelly, for emphasizing self-promotion over charitable contributions in hyping his new album, The Rising, a haunting series of memories seemingly pulled from 9/11 survivors.
Or ask Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond brokerage firm that was left with only a third of its employees after World Trade Center 1 collapsed. A Slate online columnist has raised the question of whether Cantor's new ad campaign, in which surviving employees somberly address the public, flaunts “the pain and loss of the firm as a form of emotional blackmail and suggesting that doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald is a way of helping those who suffered a great loss on Sept. 11.”
Clearly, people are watching would-be 9/11 entrepreneurs and artists closely. I have a question: Just who decides what's morally right and what's morally contemptible when capitalism decides to lay claim to the ghostly remains of the World Trade