{"id":356,"date":"2006-05-27T12:17:06","date_gmt":"2006-05-27T16:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/05\/27\/the-oreilly-web-20-debacle-continues\/"},"modified":"2006-05-27T12:17:06","modified_gmt":"2006-05-27T16:17:06","slug":"the-oreilly-web-20-debacle-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/05\/27\/the-oreilly-web-20-debacle-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"The O’Reilly Web 2.0 debacle continues"},"content":{"rendered":"

As my fellow conference organizer (and yes, it was a Web 2.0 conference) Rob Hyndman notes in his latest post<\/a>, we’ve had a bit of a debate going among the mesh<\/a> gang about the whole O’Reilly trademark thing — and not just because we have kind of an interest in whether conferences can use the term. From a philosophical point of view, Stuart believes <\/a> that O’Reilly should be able to trademark the term, since they were the ones to popularize it and build a conference business around it. As he put it, why should they not be allowed to somehow protect the value that they created?<\/p>\n

My point is not just that it’s stretching things to say they “created” value in any meaningful sense by using the term Web 2.0 — although, as a commenter on the O’Reilly Radar blog notes, the term was used in a widely-publicized sense as early as 1999<\/a> — but more that I don’t see the point in trying to “protect” it, or how that benefits O’Reilly’s business. If anything, in fact, trying to protect that value by sending cease-and-desist letters to a non-profit group in Ireland has damaged O’Reilly’s brand, in the sense that it has got people re-thinking their commitment to the company. That just doesn’t seem very smart in a whole bunch of ways.<\/p>\n

Now people are even starting to mutter about how there has been little or no response from the “FOO” camp, or friends of O’Reilly — and what response there has been, including the recent post<\/a> from Cory “freedom fighter” Doctorow at BoingBoing, seems particularly mealy-mouthed and disingenuous at best. In the end, however, I think Cory seems to be making the same point I am trying to (although he dances around it), which is that it’s better for O’Reilly to be known as the pre-eminent Web 2.0 conference holder than it is to be known as the lawyer-mongering owner of that trademark. Way better, in fact.<\/p>\n

Are people going to stop going to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conferences just because some non-profit group in Ireland uses the term? Hardly. But there might be people out there reconsidering their attendance as a result of all this ham-handed trademark bullshit. That’s the real issue for O’Reilly, it seems to me. Chris Messina was right in what he said in a comment on one of my previous posts: O’Reilly should make Web 2.0 a “community mark”<\/a> — a Creative Commons-style public trademark — and put all this to rest.<\/p>\n

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As my fellow conference organizer (and yes, it was a Web 2.0 conference) Rob Hyndman notes in his latest post, we’ve had a bit of a debate going among the mesh gang about the whole O’Reilly trademark thing — and not just because we have kind of an interest in whether conferences can use the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The O’Reilly Web 2.0 debacle continues”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}