Cyberdyne and the immorality of modern business

There is a Japanese company called Cyberdyne which has just announced a product called HAL. Now, if you are at all well-informed about modern culture, you will recognize both those terms. That you do is, in itself, somewhat of a disgrace.

Cyberdyne is the name of the fictional company in the Terminator films, based on Harlan Ellison's story, that made the chips used in the Terminator robots. HAL is the name of the artificially intelligent computer in Arthur C Clarke's (and Stanley Kubrick's) 2001.

I find it galling that a Japanese start up firm should steal these names out of popular culture so as to trade on the familiarity and goodwill created in those names, by the true original creators of them. It strikes me as profoundly wrong. Yet they have the nerve on their site to write that HAL and Cyberdyne are trademarks and service marks of Cyberdyne Inc protected by Japanese and foreign trademark laws. Well, what about the protection under copyright laws of the true creators of these terms? How about their rights?

Cyberdyne Inc. is a company that, in moral terms, deserves to fail. There is no excuse for stealing these names from elsewhere just so as to trade on the familiarity already created in them. They could - and should - have created their own names to identify their products.

Incidentally, there is an aspect of this which they haven't thought clearly about. In stealing the Cyberdyne and HAL names they also adopt some of the subtextual baggage that comes with those terms. Cyberdyne is, in the Terminator films, ultimately responsible for the end of the world as we know it. HAL turned out to be a murderous machine. So, unknowingly or otherwise, people will have these associations with their products.

HAL stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb - and that is what it is: a robotic device to assist the movement of the weakened and physically incapable. It is based on the work of Professor Sankai of the University of Tsukuba. I wonder at that. Is his technical work as original as his verbal choices? No doubt we will find out, in time.

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