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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."
I trademark "First Post" tm!
Bill O'Reilly is always up to crazy stuff. Next he'll want to patent racy phone calls that generate a lawsuit.
What? Oh, you don't mean that O'Reilly? Yeah, we'll they are crazy too. Al Gore invented the word website.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Way back in the mid-1990s, O'Reilly published a web server program for Windows called... wait for it... Website Professional. Generally abbreviated as O'Reilly Website or just Website. It was later sold to Deerfield, which incorporated it into their VisNetic line. Eventually, Deerfield dropped the product entirely.
So as crazy as it seems, they actually had a product to trademark.
Might as well trademark the equivant phrase "overhyped vaporware"!
When did O'Reilly stop being about making quality books and stuff and start being about creating buzzwords and catchphrases (Web 2.0, bleh.) and trademarking them?
There was a time when I'd buy an O'Reilly book to learn a new technology; now I mostly just find resources on the web via Google. I half-seriously wonder if lots of other developers made the same transition and eroded O'Reilly's original and sane-seeming business model.
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!
1) Maker Faire, Netizen, and Web 2.0 are all registered for a single use: Conferences. They named a conference and they should be allowed to protect that name. If someone started running their own thing and couldn't come up with a name so they called it E3 or PCExpo, you'd expect the holders of those trademarks to sue, no?
2) The "Website" trademark application was also for a single use, in this case "computer software used to create a server on a global computer network..". Apparently, O'Reilly used to make a piece of software called "Website Professional", and it was this uninspired name they were trying to protect. Again, color me unsurprised.
This entire argument has gone back and forth a million times already, so it's kind of pointless. People who are anti-trademarks will argue that this is word-squatting and that "netizen" and "web 2.0" are public domain words. People who aren't will argue that the trademarks only cover their original uses by O'Reilly and thus using the word(s) netizen on a website or a newspaper or even the cover of a best-selling book is not infringement.
Thank god, now finally the damn buzz-word will be gone forever.
Now what'll we use to impress C level management??? Hard work??? I want more jargon! All I have left is Ajax!
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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.
Have you people never heard of the tragedy of the commons? Words and phrases that are owned "collectively" will be mismanaged into meaninglessness. Ideally, every possible combination of characters and punctuation will be owned by someone. Only then will our words be safe from the evil communists seeking to collectivize our precious language.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
USPTO = United States Patent and Trademark Office.
This means that in the US:
Patent Office = USPTO
Trademark Office = USPTO
So, even though patent != trademark, we can still conclude that:
Patent Office = Trademark Office
Slashdot is one of my favourite [REDACTED], because it keeps me informed on all the recent developments in the exciting fields of [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and Doctor Who.
I use my [REDACTED]-aggregator for quick access to all of the cool articles, and then follow the underlined [REDACTED] to other [REDACTED] with related information! Easy as 1-2-[REDACTED]!
Of course, paying the IP tax to read certain words like [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] can be a bit of a pain, but [I HEARTILY ENDORSE ALL ACTIONS OF THE PATENT OFFICE]!
Your friend,
[REDACTED]
These stories are free but worth money.
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.