Web 2.0 trade-mark demand causes kerfuffle
The blogsphere is buzzing about a demand letter sent by O’Reilly saying another party can’t use “web 2.0″ for a conference, because they have trade-marked it for conference use.
I might as well add my 2 cents worth (or should that be 2.0 cents worth?)
This is one of those cases where legal reasoning gets in the way of business judgement.
At best “web 2.0″ is a weak trade-mark, in that it is arguably descriptive, and is not distinctive.
One irony is that they perhaps have been a victim of their own success. They did such a good job of using, promoting and publicising the term web 2.0, that it has become generic.
Another irony is that web 2.0 is all about collaboration and sharing. Hardly collaborative if you won’t even let others use the term!
The best trade-marks are memorable and distinctive, not descriptive.
In my view, this one is not worth protecting at this point from a business perspective.
A techmeme post has a lot of good commentary on this.
Also take a look at Rob Hyndman’s thoughts which are noteworthy in that he was one of the organizers of the recent Mesh web 2.0 conference in Toronto.
