May 26, 2006 at 4:27AM Would everybody please stop stating that O’Reilly are going after Tom Raftery for trademark infringement?
They’re not. Tom made a mistake in his post. Please, go reread the letter they sent him. Read it carefully. ORA are mentioned once and once only, and only to state that they co-organise the Web 2.0 Conference with CMP. It’s certainly nothing to do with Tim, but it’d be good if he’d publically tell CMP to screw themselves. It’s possible that CMP may claim ORA are behind them, but I have my doubts: doing so would be bad for ORA’s business.
The bad guys, the guys with the dodgy trademark claim, are CMP. The claim is groundless. They’ve only submitted an application, and then only in the US. They can go to hell.
Update (March 26th, 11:40): It turns out I gave O’Reilly far more credit than they deserved. They apparently approved of the action on CMP’s part. I’m disappointed. Not so much because they’re defending their service mark, but because of the manner they went about it. A C&D letter is about as nasty and aggressive as you can get. Had this been dealt with the right way, that is to say with a polite letter stating that they’d a pending service mark, but that they’d allow IT@Cork use it this year, that would have been another thing entirely. That said, I’m with Twenty on this, and they can still go to hell. I already avoid CMP’s magazines, and now I’m going to prefer other publishers over O’Reilly where I can when buying and recommending books. I may only spend a few grand on the things, but that’s less cash in their pockets and more in the pockets of their competitors.
And before anybody thinks to counter the claim with the argument that the service mark has no validity here because it hasn’t been registered with the Irish Trade Marks Registry or the Office for Harmonisation of the Internal Market, that’s not a valid argument. Ireland since 2001 and the US since 2003 are both signatories of the Madrid Protocol, which makes trade and service marks registered in one signatory country valid in another.
However, there is one positive upshot of all this: I intensely dislike the phrase Web 2.0, and if this has a chilling effect on the use of this bullshit phrase, which I predict and hope it does, all the better.
Update (May 28th, 5:00): I’m informed that to be covered under the Madrid Protocol, the individual or group with the trade or service mark has to pony up hard cash to the WIPO. I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous: the nasty little racket the WIPO are running or CMP/O’Reilly’s stupidity for not taking advantage of it in the first place.
1 On May 26, 2006 at 10:40, danger wrote:
thanks for the heads up on this Keith.