Fencing the Commons

Greedheads at the NFL want to trademark the expression "The Big Game" so as to further their ability to extort tribute from businesses whose sales get a boost from Super Bowl viewers. The greedheads in the football programs at Stanford and Cal, backed up by the greedheads at the NCAA, are contesting, on the grounds that the annual football matchup between the two universities has been known as the Big Game since before there ever was an NFL. It would be hard to decide which side to root against, were it not for the fact that the precipitating action was the NFL's filing to take a widely used expression out of the public domain and turn it into their private property. So even though the other guys don't particularly deserve to win, the NFL overwhelmingly deserves to lose.