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O'Reilly Lawyers Set Up Shop in the Patent Office

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 22, 2006 01:32 PM
from the great-uses-of-time dept.
Patents
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."
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[+] Technology: O'Reilly and CMP Exercise Trademark on 'Web 2.0' 229 comments
theodp writes "On May 16, the USPTO notified CMP Media, which co-presents the Web 2.0 Conference with O'Reilly, that its trademark for Web 2.0 was entitled to be registered. Eight days later, CMP sicced its lawyers on not-for-profit IT@Cork, taking the networking organization to task for not only using the term Web 2.0 for its free conference, but also for linking to a What is Web 2.0 article penned by Tim O'Reilly." It should be noted that their trademark only applies to the titles of industry events (CMP is a show organizer).
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O'Reilly Lawyers Set Up Shop in the Patent Office 25 Comments More /

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  • FP Trademark (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:34PM (#15956815)
    I trademark "First Post" tm!

  • I'm Trademarking Trademark! (tm) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:35PM (#15956821)
    "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."
    Un-fucking-believable (tm)

    • Re:I'm Trademarking Trademark! (tm) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jo42 (227475) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:56PM (#15957014) Homepage
      No kidding, they've gone from "Good Guys" to "Shite Sucking Weasels" in my book.

    • MAKER FAIRE is an OK trademark (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CalvinLawson (997097) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @02:00PM (#15957050)
      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.

      • This is all just so ludicrous. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DancesWithBlowTorch (809750) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @02:33PM (#15957257)
        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.

  • That crazy Bill (Score:5, Funny)

    by saskboy (600063) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:36PM (#15956834) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • On the subject of Website... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:36PM (#15956836) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:On the subject of Website... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arth1 (260657) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:43PM (#15956907) Homepage Journal
      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.

      Regards,
      --
      *Art

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Otter (3800)
        I think his point is that while "website" may be a common word today, it was not when they filed on December 28, 1994.
      • Like "xerox", "kleenex", and "thermos"?

            • It does actually appear to have been a common term to describe, erm, websites: Examples [google.com]. 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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by saddino (183491)
        To answer the big question:

        1) There is nothing wrong with using everyday words as trademarks. Many consumer products do (just check out your supermarket aisles).

        2) Trademarks, when applied for, must describe the market for their good and/or service. A trademark simply protects the good/service in that market, and does not stop anyone from using the word in any other context (or even for any other product/service, given some caveats, e.g. famous marks).

        3) Trademarks need to be actively defended, so a C+D l

    • Re:On the subject of Website... (Score:5, Informative)

      by eln (21727) * on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:44PM (#15956918) Homepage
      And if you actually look at the trademark application, it states that they were seeking to trademark the term as it relates to "computer software used to create a server on a global computer network and enable management of documents on the server, for use by those who access the electronic global information infrastructure". Also, the trademark application was not rejected, it was abandoned by O'Reilly.

      So, the summary is a little misleading as it seems to suggest that they were trying to blanket trademark an obviously generic (even at the time) word.

  • Web 2.0 trademark (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:40PM (#15956871)
    Might as well trademark the equivant phrase "overhyped vaporware"!

  • In all seriousness... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mongoose Disciple (722373) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:40PM (#15956882)
    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.

    • Re:In all seriousness... (Score:4, Informative)

      by nuzak (959558) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @02:26PM (#15957215) Journal
      > When did O'Reilly stop being about making quality books and stuff and start being about creating buzzwords and catchphrases (

      Around the time the "Hacks" series came out. Those are some seriously crappy books, almost without exception.

      Manning Press has some really nice books out these days with the "In Action" series.

  • What's wrong with a trademark? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PCM2 (4486) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:53PM (#15956993) Homepage
    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!

  • These make sense (Score:5, Informative)

    by Plutor (2994) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:54PM (#15957005) Homepage
    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 [geotrust.com]", 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.
  • 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.

  • Comment from 2016 (Score:5, Funny)

    by CheeseburgerBrown (553703) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @02:16PM (#15957146) Homepage Journal
    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]

    • Re:Yayy (Score:5, Funny)

      by rainman_bc (735332) on Tuesday August 22 2006, @01:59PM (#15957033)
      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!

    • Re:patents != trademark (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday August 22 2006, @02:11PM (#15957113) Homepage Journal
      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

        • You just assigned Trademark Office to Patent Office.

          Not everybody codes in C. Some code in Pascal or other languages where assignment is represented as := or <=. Some code in dialects of LISP where let and set! are used for creating variables. Some code in BASIC where = in an expression context means equality but = in a statement context means assignment. Some people code in Java, where using an assignment in the condition of an if or while loop results in a compile error of no automatic cast to boolea

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