Talk:Nippon Columbia

Columbia Readymade's original name?
The IP-address editor who first added the current label-names list stated Columbia Readymade was "founded as ********* records, tokyo and renamed as Readymade Records". A short row of asterisks is ordinarily used in English-language text to censor an expletive; but expletives routinely exist in the English-language Wikipedia as they are almost always entitled to First Amendment protection in the U.S. When used in encyclopedic form, expletives generally do *NOT* "lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value", the third requirement of the obscenity exception to the First Amendment (per Miller v. California, upheld by the Supreme Court less than a month ago in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association), even when the other two requirements are met. (Example: the article on the Cee Lo Green hit goes by its uncensored title, "Fuck You!"--*NOT* "F**k You", "F*** You", "F U", "Forget You", or any other substitute for its expletive, which also has its own article. It can still be censored from U.S. airwaves per FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, but not from Wikipedia.)

Also, even if Nippon Columbia was forced to abandon that name due to copyright and/or trademark conflicts with another company, it's still appropriate to use in this article, as in the U.S. merely citing that name would still qualify as "fair use" in both its copyright and trademark forms. (Example: "This Can't Be Yogurt", the original name of the TCBY yogurt chain, is still used in the TCBY article for that purpose, despite being abandoned after an infringement lawsuit by competitor I Can't Believe It's Yogurt!.) "Fair use" also covers internationally-split trademarks when used appropriately, as in Nippon Columbia's own trademarks (owned by Columbia Records everywhere *but* Japan).

If anyone knows what Columbia Readymade's original name was, please add it to the article--even if it's an expletive or a copyright and/or trademark conflict. If it's a Japanese language term, translate it into English if possible (if you can't do it yourself, try Google Translate or Yahoo! Babel Fish, or if on a website use Google Chrome), then post all available forms (English, Japanese characters, etc.) as per the examples in the article's first paragraph. --RBBrittain (talk) 16:20, 16 July 2011 (UTC)