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26 May 2006
Legal insanity in Web 2.0-land
Posted by Paul Miller at May 26, 2006 09:52 AM
Tom Raftery reproduces a letter from lawyers acting on behalf of CMP Media LLC over on his blog.
Tom is involved in organising an event in Cork on 8 June and this event, like a large number of others, is looking at issues around the topic of Web 2.0.
CMP Media LLC, based in the United States, is the company that lays on the annual Web 2.0 Conference with Tim O'Reilly's O'Reilly Media, and their lawyers appear to have totally lost their grip on reality because of IT Cork's use of the phrase 'Web 2.0... Conference' in the title of their Irish event. The letter asserts that CMP have a pending application to register 'Web 2.0' as a (United States, presumably) service mark “for arranging and conducting live events”.
It would therefore not appear - as some of the fuss generated by Tom's post would imply - that CMP's lawyers are trying to prevent broader use of 'Web 2.0' as a term. It is also not apparent that O'Reilly Media had anything to do with this.
That aside, and fully recognising the right of a media dinosaur to apply the legal practices of such organisations whenever, however, and wherever they please within the bounds of the law, it does seem a particularly assinine way to attempt to deal with this particular community.
It reminds me of the fuss when someone registered 'metadata', and started bombarding the world with letters very similar to this one. We ignored them then. Do we ignore CMP now, or do we assume that those associated with CMP and its lawyers will see sense and send this particular cease-and-desist-brandishing rotweiller back into its kennel?
The big difference is the standing of some of the organisations associated with this. The Metadata Company were nobodys. O'Reilly Media is widely perceived as 'one of the good guys', and Tim as even better than that. I trust that they value their standing in the community sufficiently to quash this... and quickly.
Update: Oh dear. I hadn't reached this response from someone at O'Reilly. Standing alongside their partners because that's possibly the right thing to do, or actually supporting this silly idea?
Technorati Tags: Intellectual Property, Web 2.0, web2con
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Tracked on May 26, 2006 12:00 PM
