Over 15 years ago I got a threatening letter because I created a guide called "Library Jargon" and offered it up via FTP, gopher and email. Some rinky-dink company claimed they had a trademark and copyright to it. I wrote them back after doing a search via gopher on the tphrase in question and found over 200 other documents with the same title. I sent the search results to them and never heard from them again.
Bill Drew -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roy Tennant Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 9:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Patents and open source projects I once got a "cease and desist" letter from a legal firm defending someone's trademark for "metadata". I mean, seriously. Perhaps obviously, I ignored it. It's still in my files somewhere. Roy On Dec 6, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[email protected]> wrote: > Ironically, I had (or there was) some trouble with the term > "MyLibrary@NCState". Granted, the term was originally a variation of My > Netscape, My Yahoo, and My Deja News, but all sorts of things followed it, > like MyiLibrary, the Google Books My Library, and then there was a ALA thing. > I'm not necessarily saying MyLibrary was the leader here, but an example of > how trademarks (monikers) can be used, abused, and morphed. --Eric Morgan
