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O'Reilly Lawyers Set Up Shop in the Patent Office
theodp writes "On the same day Netizens fumed over the trademarking of Web 2.0 (R), lawyers for O'Reilly were beating a path to the USPTO to file for a trademark on MAKER FAIRE, lest some Irish scallywag try to co-opt that catchy phrase for a conference. Speaking of NETIZENS, USPTO records show O'Reilly once sought a trademark for that term. And while details are sketchy, USPTO records also indicate that O'Reilly not only sought to trademark the term WEBSITE, it was the plaintiff in a scheduled Trademark Trial involving a defendant who laid claim to the phrase WEB CITE."
The question is whether everyday words should be allowed trademarked, and how doing this reflects upon those who grab the trademark. Before long, we'll see unscrupulous people trademarking everyday terms like Windows or top level domains like dot-net.
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*Art
And so if I try and trademark "Blog" as the name of some software I have for maintaining blogs, I shouldn't be considered evil?
Tim O'Reilly and his Web 2.0 trademark are now being seen for what they really are - evil attempts at forcing others out of his industry (technology publishing) by trademarking the jargin related to it. That's evil in a way Microsoft could only dream of being.
I haven't bough O'Reilly books for a while, and I'm certainly not going to be after learning about this. O'Reilly can burn in Hell for all I care.
I think his point is that while "website" may be a common word today, it was not when they filed on December 28, 1994.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
When you apply for a trademark, you are applying for exclusive use of a given mark for a particular business area. If O'Reilly registers the phrase "Maker Faire" as a trademark for the business of trade conferences, what exactly is wrong with that? Most people wouldn't argue that it would probably be wrong for somebody to start up some mom-n-pop copy store and call it "FedEx Kinko's." They can't do that, because the real FedEx Kinko's has registered that mark as a trademark. Similarly, if O'Reilly invests a considerable amount of money to organize, advertise, staff, and otherwise produce a trade show and they have decided on a name for that trade show, why on earth should they not trademark that name?? If some "Irish scallywag" moved to Palo Alto next week and threw together a fly-by-night trade show under the name "Maker Faire," how could it conceivably not damage the equity O'Reilly has invested in that brand? Protecting business investments is the purpose of trademarks.
NEWS FLASH: The name "Slashdot" is trademarked. Shock! Horror!
Breakfast served all day!
No kidding, they've gone from "Good Guys" to "Shite Sucking Weasels" in my book.
Like "xerox", "kleenex", and "thermos"?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
OK, unless you're of the "trademarks are evil" school, it seems like there's nothing wrong with this. In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond talks about how he and O'Reilly tried to trademark the term "Open Source", and have it defined by the OSD. His reasoning was that there would be legal recourse against people using the term open source when not actually opening their source code. And after seeing shenanigans of this sort (Sun, anyone?), this makes perfect sense.
Common editors, you have been doing this for how long, and you still don't know the difference between patents and trademarks?
As a small business owner, I know that often you have to file patents and trademarks defensively.
In other words, it may not be that O'Reilly particularly wants to grab the term and vindictively go after people who use it, but rather that they felt the need to trademark the phrase to protect themselves from someone who may try to do it first and then go after them. My guess is that any name O'Reilly chose would've been trademarked, regardless of how novel it was.
This is probably more a product of our ridiculous trademark/patenting/copyright system than O'Reilly par se.
I agree that companies should be allowed to protect the names of their products to make sure they are not used by other companies for their products, be they similar to the Original (in which case we would speak of plagiarism) or completely different (in which case they might still make unfair use of the original companie's product's fame). That's what trademarks are for.
But I think this is a very limited scope. A trademark should, in my opinion, not allow you to forbid anyone to simply _use_ the name of your product (as opposed to stick it to their own products). Words are symbolic representations of the sounds we make with our tongues while speaking. They are free like the wind. Imagine Microsoft would sue a carpenter because he sold windows. The fine line lies in the difference between using a word as a name and a word as a word. You cannot trademark words. If you could, Shakespeare's heirs would have a nice source of income from about every native English-speaker in the world. How is a "maker fair" or a "web site" a name? They are just words. "Microsoft Windows" is a name. "Windows" is not. "Dodge Ram" is a name. "dodge" and "ram" are words.
It does actually appear to have been a common term to describe, erm, websites: Examples. Of course, there weren't many in 1994.
There may not have been a massive number of mentions, the count is in the hundreds not thousands, but that appears to be the time the term started to become popular. So it looks like O'Reilly jumped on a technology that was emerging at that point, and decided to trademark a term already in use by those already using the technology.
That doesn't strike me as acceptable.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.