Via Tuppenceworth comes news that this Web 2.0 malarky will also ban college courses from mentioning web 2.0 in their title.
If I were a university, college or educator I’d look askance at the property rights being sought in relation to Class 41. If granted it would allow CMP to prevent any educational institution from running a class, lecture, conference or workshop with the phrase “Web 2.0″ in the title. And according to their own statements and letters, once such property rights had been granted to them, they would feel themselves obliged in all cases to take action to protect them.
Now that’s a bit rich.
When I buy an O’Reilly textbook with an accompanying teacher kit, I get an explicit license to repackage the material in academic courses. As far as I know, Class 41 conditions cannot erode an explicit license. We use ORA documentation and Safari Bookshelf items in a chop-and-change manner in third level education without any restriction on what we can call the course or how we can market those materials externally.
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Generally, trademarks only apply within a product domain, though, don’t they? Classes are hardly the same things as conferences.
Rob is correct. This is the kind of typical lack of understanding of trademark law that amazes me. Even reading the Wikipedia entry on trademarks would give you enough knowledge about the subject to know that a class called “Web 2.0” isn’t going to attract any ire from O’Reilly.