Once More, into the Shitstorm
I'm leaving tonight for a peaceful vacation in Ireland,
starting
with a week in Dublin and then onto a car/bike meander to Cork, where
I'll enjoy a pleasant Bloggers dinner and drink in the wisdom of Shel Israel
and Salim Ismail
(shades of Skinny Legs and All!)
at the refined Web
2.0 Half Day Conference, under the auspices of the
(presumably) genteel Cork
Regional Network for IT Professionals.
What a delicious prospect. I'm ready to be embraced by the
graces of
a slower time and place, free from the frenetic grasping of our
overly-keen culture, twisting every spontaneous innovation into a
volation of an existing bizplan.
Oops!
Scratch That!
It turns out that no corner of the globe is safe from the sensitized
grievances of self-important US institutions and their lawyers. Our
host Tim Raftery
reports
and Shel echoes
and Digg amplified, that lawyers for O'Reilly Publishing
have
copyrighted "Web 2.0" and so are supremely uninterested in this Irish
attack on the O'Reilly conference franchise:
Mind you, we're talking about an O'Reilly
attacking a Raftery.
Is there a deeper significance? Might there be a simmering
centuries-old feud between the Raftery and O'Reilly clans? You never
know in these clan-based societies that seem to befuddle our nation
so.
Lemme get this straight. O'reilly and CMP want to own the idea
of giving stuff away. Can you really "own" a phrase that, according
to Dave
Winer, appears 79,400,000 times on the web? This is doomed to
fail on so many levels.
A Web 2.0 by any other Name is still a Hype
The one-two punch of the hype surrounding Web 2.0 and
now this action prompts Brian
Oberkirch to denounce
the whole meme:
I was
already tired of the phrase and we had been phasing out
references in all the Big
in Japan tools. With all the lawyer
tomfoolerly
yesterday,
though, I’ve come to the Roberto Duran point: no mas.
It’s outlived its
usefulness, and, as these things tend to go, with
money involved people start acting crazy. So, we’re not using
that
phrase anymore. We’re totally stoked about what’s
going on in the Web
& in social media. All our friends are still making great
stuff. We
just won’t let this phrase be the signpost for the
conversation.
Process Trumping
Tromping People
I've worked with Tim O'Reilly and Sara Winge and respect and
like them – Sara and I had a meeting re ORGware just last
month at their offices in Sebastopol. They're smart and serious about
open source. Sara
says they wish they'd talked to the folks in Cork before
siccing the lawyers on them.
This PR disaster is a great argument for my principle that
companies should not keep people as busy as they do. Sara's post
tells the tale of process, not communication. Doc told me it's "A
lawyer mistake while Tim was on vacation."
Unfortunately, that won't mollify the masses. Whether it's
contaminated Tylenol or Audi's nonexistent unintended
acceleration self-hypnosis, the facts are no match for the
perception. I'm sure they'll get out ahead of this with a sincere and
open dialogue, starting today. Maybe they create a licensing program on
their site so anyone can use the mark by acknowledging that they have
no rights to the mark.
Copy Right vs. Copy Wrong
For what it's worth, I'm in O'Reilly's shoes myself. I'm not
half the businessman or humanitarian that Tim is, but I have the luxury
of a little time for reflection. Open Resource Group, LLC owns the
registered trademark "Open Resource". So naturally I and my attorney
were enchanted to learn, a couple of months ago, that Infoworld.com had
a terrific blog they called "Open
Resource":
BY DAVE ROSENBERG AND MATT ASAY
Candid, irreverent, comprehensive commentary, news, and analysis of the
growing open source industry.
Check it out – it's great. Because I'm not as busy
as people in a "real" company like O'Reilly, I picked up the phone and
called Jon
Udell for counsel on how I could avoid being a jerk about
this - I'm sure those were my exact words. He did some research,
concluded that our mark is valid, talked to his people, and wondered
what I was going to do about it. I started thinking about it and
haven't finished. Meanwhile, IDG has quietly changed the title of the
page to "Open Sources", although the directory is still
"/openresource". I could care less about this "infringement". One good
thing about attorneys is that you can tell them to mind their own
business, but that may be clearer to a former real estate developer
than to publishers.
Since we own the mark and
the domain name, why should I be concerned? We'll develop our brand one
customer at a time by earning and maintaining their trust. Tim and Sara
know this, but they're stuck in a corporate environment that forces
them to listen to so few lawyers rather than attend to so many friends.
That is SO Web 1.0.
11:09:40 AM 
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