I'm curious

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Has anyone here been following the huge brouhaha over O'Rielly Books sending a Cease and Desist letter to IT@Cork over their usage of the term "Web 2.0" in advertising a half-day confernce on Web 2.0 technologies and issues?

If you have followed it, what is your opinion on the entire mess?

 

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Sounds like a simple case of one arm of each organisation not knowing what the other is doing. Reading the press release from O'Really about the whole sorry affair it appears that it could easily have been avoided had they just spoken to each other without getting the lawyers involved.

Of course, its equally likely that someone in corporate legal there wanted to make a name for themselves and someone at IT@Cork get some free publicity.

Personally I think copyrighting 'Web 2.0' is a bit of a cheek anyway tbh - but if its been granted, then IT@Cork have to respect it.

 

I see trademarking 'Web 2.0' as pretty strange too, especially as O'Rielly has pretty much targeted open source technologies, and those geeks who are committed to open source, in their business model. Did they really not expect to get a major backlash from their own customer base? I find it incredible that they didn't seem to take this into account when deciding to trademark a buzzword for a group of technologies used by a large cross-section of the open source community.

The other problem with this is that nobody even knew until after this all blew that O'Rielly had trademarked the phrase. O'Rielly has done as much as anyone to make 'Web 2.0' less a trademark than a meme, and they have done this knowing all along that they had filed to trademark the phrase.

What's even weirder to me about the situation is that Tim O'Rielly has really tried to give some arguments that don't even make sense in the context that he uses them. He keeps trying to compare companies like Apple trademarking a common word, their brand name for their OS and their computers, to O'Rielly trademarking a phrase that refers to what is in essense a reference to a varied group of open sourced technolgies.