Lottery Fantasy: Cash Prize for Hugo Awards

[kevin_standlee]

What with half-a-billion dollars up for grabs in the MegaMillions draw, one starts to think of things one could do with the money, even if (as I would) you opt for the NPV rather than the annuity

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

Yeah, as I build this castle in the air I thought of that. Personally, I don't think I'd need WSFS's permission to create such a foundation, unless I used some of the IP of the organization in the name or something like that. Give it a sufficiently generic name that doesn't use one of the service marks and simply announce that the foundation would award $N to every Hugo Award winner and I don't see what the Business Meeting could do about it. And remember, I think about this from the other side as the WSFS MPC Chairman.

WSFS owns the service marks, which means it can control certain misuses. What it can't do is tell you not to use one of the service marks to legitimately describe the Worldcon or the Hugo Awards. (In fact, we like people to do that; it strengthens Worldcon's service mark the more people use it to describe the World Science Fiction Convention.) I think attempting to order a hypothetical Standlee Foundation to not award money to Hugo Award winners would make WSFS look completely absurd, and couldn't be stopped anyway, as long as it wasn't called the "Hugo Award Foundation" or something like that. (IANAL; this is an intellectual exercise.)

As far as backdoor WSFS Inc. attempts go, I understand there's a move afoot to set up a non-profit corporation to preserve Worldcon's history, which is laudable, but mildly raises my WSFS Inc. radar. I'm not accusing any of the people involved of base intentions, really. It's a good cause, and having no permanent organization to hold and care for the amount of stuff that the vaguely defined Worldcon entity has acquired through the years is something to worry about as we watch (for instance) the WSFS banner fray and decay.