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Hotel Being Sued for Using the Dewey Decimal System
cbull writes "Did you know the Dewey Decimal System isn't in the public domain? The rights are owned by the Online Computer Library Center. They are suing the Library Hotel in New York for trademark infringement. In addition, according to the article, libraries pay at least $500/year to use the system."
From the article:
"A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system."
Don't you think that a person browsing the website might just think "Oh, they're a theme hotel"?
On the other hand, if libraries have to license it, then I guess that's how it works.
I think they trademarked the term "Dewey Decimal System". The objection isn't to the use of the system itself (even if it was patented, I doubt the patent would extend to hotel room clasification) it's that the website uses the term (or trademark) Dewey Decimal System all over it.
Both Dewey and Library of Congress are "divide and conquer" stratergies - that is, you split the search space into smaller and smaller chunks until you find what you're looking for.
This is an acceptable solution when you're searching on paper or your search sapce isn't that large, but today we have computers and far more data.
For example, "Algorithms in C" is a classic text a lot of people here probably own.
But does it belong under "math", "computer science", or "computer languages -> C"? (Dewey seperates Computing out into a seperate category, rather than placing it under math).
The answer, of course, is all three.
The ideal system would be a free-text search of all the books in the catalogue. But until we can do that, keywords and searchable abstracts are more useful than categories. Just put the damn books on the shelf in order of author.
One more time: The hotel isn't just using the classification system, it stole the trademark "Dewey Decimal" to advertise a profit-making business that uses the system. If Microsoft decided to rename its Services for Unix product to Linux.NET without getting Mr. Torvald's permission, would that be okay?