(zur Vorgeschichte bzgl. des Trademarks des Wortes “Web 2.0” bzw. “Web 2.0 Conference” bitte hier entlang)

Tim O’Reilly ist aus dem Urlauib zurückgekehrt und hat auf radar.oreilly.com eine laaaaaange Verteidigungsrede geschrieben, die erst einmal mit einem Generalabwasch beginnt:

The flap about the Web 2.0 Conference trademark has shaken my faith in the collective intelligence of the blogosphere. Of all the hundreds of people who commented on this issue, only a few touched base to do a bit of fact checking. The New York Times, by contrast, was all over doing due-diligence. They talked to everyone they could get their hands on before publishing their story.

While I admit that the cease-and-desist letter to IT@Cork was a faux pas, the blogosphere response and especially the comments on Sara’s posts to the Radar blog have been appalling both in their tone (even to the point of one comment, which Marc Hedlund deleted in my absence, implying that I’m a child molester!) and in their lack of any fact checking. (Thanks to those brave blog commenters who suggested that the mob hold off till I was back and able to respond.)

Es folgt dann eine umfangreiche Verargumentation was warum wie passiert ist. Auch wenn Tim O’Reilly abstreitet, dass “Web2.0” ein zu generischer Begriff (geworden) ist um ihn mit einem Trademark für Konferenzveranstaltungen zu belegen, zwischen den Zeilen kann man deutliches Unbehagen von seiner Seite aus hören:

7. The success of the Web 2.0 conferences and the usefulness of the term admittedly complicates the Web 2.0 trademark situation. With a name like LinuxWorld (Sara’s analogy), the subject of the conference (Linux) and its trademarked name (LinuxWorld) are not one and the same. But with Web 2.0, the name was originally conceived only as the name for a conference and Cory Doctorow’s comments are very much on point. We created a meme that has legs beyond the conference space, and there’s a real tension between the desire to protect the trademark on the conference and the desire for people to talk about, meet about, and otherwise engage with what has turned out to be the name for the next big thing in the computer industry. This is clearly a problem that we’ll need to figure out.

Tim O’Reilly wird sich mit CMP zusammensetzen um zu beraten wie man die Geschichte aus der Welt schaffen kann. Dabei deutet er an, eine Art “Richtlinie” bzw. Guidelines zu erstellen, ähnlich wie es die Mozilla Foundation für ihr Mozilla Trademark gemacht hat.