Dobbshead

A typical Dobbshead

A Dobbshead is an image of the head of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs with his characteristic grin and his pipe full of frop. Typically Dobbsheads are all derived from the same image, a piece of 1950s clip-art that "Bob" posed for, during his career as a male model and actor who did cameo acting gigs in many movies of that period as well as instructional films and documentaries. The original image is a halftone image that uses amplitude modulation to form a collection of regularly spaced round dots of varying sizes, and is in black and white, although there are colorized variants of the Dobbshead that have appeared in more recent decades. It is said that by looking at an original black-and-white Dobbshead and seeing the dots, anyone with Yeti ancestry, even if they have never heard of the Church of the SubGenius, suddenly has all of their subconscious, inherited memories of their Yeti ancestors activated, and immediately remembers everything and fully understands all SubGenius principles. Once someone is activated by seeing a true, original Dobbshead in black and white with the dots, they become a mindless slave to "Bob", doing his every whim without question. Broadcasting an original Dobbshead in the mass media or posting one at a busy street corner in a large city is a surefire way to activate very large numbers of latent SubGenii, creating an army of millions of followers of "Bob". The Church of the SubGenius has several other symbols besides the Dobbshead, for instance the Dobbs Ikon is often used as well.

The issue over whether the Dobbshead is copyright or public domain led to one of several schisms in the Church of the SubGenius. The copyright side of the argument said that the Dobbshead is a registered trademark copyright by The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. and protected by copyright law, and that for people to have permission to use the Dobbshead, they must pay money to become ordained ministers in the Church of the SubGenius. This side of the argument is the one taken by Rev. Ivan Stang, since he is CEO of the SubGenius Foundation and the one who stands to gain from having Dobbsheads copyrighted. The other side of the argument claims that the original Dobbshead appeared in a catalog of public domain clipart produced by AT&T when it had a monopoly in telephone service, and this catalog of public domain clipart was full of images that anybody could freely use for any purpose, although it was mainly intended for companies that advertised in the Yellow Pages of phone books. The original Dobbshead was, according to legend, discovered by Dr. Philo Drummond, who worked for AT&T at the time and had access to its catalogs of public domain clipart for Yellow Pages advertisers. Then the image was scanned at high resolution and redistributed, and used as the trademark and identifying symbol of the Church of the SubGenius. Legally speaking, the Dobbshead actually HAS been copyrighted and registered as a trademark by The SubGenius Foundation, Inc., because the anti-copyright side failed to provide evidence that it was ever public domain clipart, and the copyright and registered trademark were both approved by the U.S. Government. However, this has never been challenged in court. Furthermore, even if the copyright and registered trademark claims are valid, there is still the issue of what constitutes fair use under copyright law, i.e., whether or not it is legal for people to use the Dobbshead in non-commercial activities without seeking permission from the copyright holder, namely The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. But since The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. has never actually brought a case involving the Dobbshead copyright to court against anyone using it without permission, this issue remains unresolved.

There are 2 notable cases where the Dobbshead copyright became an issue. In one of the cases, the band Sublime put a Dobbshead on an album cover. Their settlement with Rev. Ivan Stang, negotiated out of court, was for all of the members of Sublime to become ordained SubGenius ministers. This was actually INCREDIBLY cheap compared to possible alternatives like having The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. receive a percentage of the profits for sales of that Sublime album; it cost less than $100, which is like pennies to a band that sells millions of copies of its music. The other notable case involved Slackware Linux, the oldest Linux distribution that still exists, whose creator, Rev. Patrick Volkerding, is an ordained SubGenius minister in good standing. For the first few versions, every CD of Slackware Linux had a Dobbshead printed on the CD. As soon as Rev. Volkerding became aware that there might be a copyright issue after being contacted by Rev. Ivan Stang about it, he proactively decided to stop printing Dobbsheads on the CDs. The main reason for that is that Linux is free and open source software that tries not to include copyrighted material that isn't made available for free to anyone under a "copyleft" license such as the GNU GPL, and Rev. Volkerding is a strong believer in Linux and the free software philosophy. So actually, the copyright issue is not much of an issue, since anyone is free to use the Dobbshead as long as they are an ordained SubGenius minister, and ordainment is quite cheap, plus Rev. Stang doesn't really try that hard to enforce the copyright anyway. However, it would be very interesting to see how the Dobbshead copyright would hold up in an official Conspiracy court of law.

Here is a video showing various things happening to a color Dobbshead:

Here is an ASCII Dobbshead from the days of yore:

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