Hello,

My name is Tom Raftery also.

You have great ideas and magnificent creativity.

Here in Australia the first Thomas Raftery arrived in Melbourne in 1841. I am Thomas the fifth.

Long may this great name prosper forever.

Thomas Raftery

Also - has there been any folow up from Cory since his subsequent folowup that you mention?

Oh, and Battelle took his latest company’s name from another existing media company that owns radio stations in many U.S. states and has been in business for more than three decades.

Ironic, or just business as usual for the John Battelles of the world?

“A lot of people have been waiting for a statement from me (Tim O’Reilly) about the Web 2.0 service mark. I’m back, and here it is. This is a long post, because the issues are complex, and I hope people will read to the end.”

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/web_20_service_mark_controvers.html

keith

OK — Nice reference to some prior art - wasn’t aware that this term really had any play prior to its coming up here.

Doesn’t really change the point I was trying to raise:

- Taking a couple of generic words and putting them together or associating them with something — Whether that be “Web 2.0″ or “Look smart” or “Windows” or “Macintosh” is the essence of a tradmark, in this case a conference

- While the *term* may be in use farily commonly, it’s use for a conference has not only your standard trademark claims, but a reasonably righteous claim that they actually took a term that came from an event they hosted and built a business out of it. The key here is righteousness. They weren’t carpetbagging it, they grew the thing from intellectual property that they had raised themselves.

- If you think O’Reilly is being unreasonable, poking some fun at the guy would be a lot more entertaining, and make you look a lot better than to cry victim here. Alternatively, you could have sent Tim a note reaching out yourself.

I have a lot more respect for the “barcamp” guys (genius) than for the crew of people who wined about not getting an invite to foocamp. Golden opportunity here to make a witty statement through your actions, which will have a longer lasting effect than the accusing blow up, backlash and crowd moving on lifecycle we’re going through here.

Sigh.

Chris, O’Reilly may have popularised the term but they didn’t coin it. The term Web 2.0 was used as far back as the late 90’s long before O’Reilly’s had even heard of it.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

While it’s certainly true that it is hard to defend the term as a trademark given what it has come to mean, the fact that the term originated at one of their conferences, and have built a busienss on top of it, strikes me as an eminently fair defensible position.

Stop whining.

“bar camp” made fun of O’Reilly’s “foo camp” cleverly. I’d encourage you to emulate that spirit.

Get a sense of humor already — You can make light of it, or try and wrap yourself with a martyr’s flag over this.

It’s also the reason I came down so hard on Raftery. He’s whipped up some venom in order to create the expectation that O’Reilly is going to issue a complete retraction. But I just don’t think having ‘half-day’ in the conference title makes it an original conference name. Neither does the fact that it’s in Ireland and €50. That’s because people aren’t going to refer to it as “Web 2.0 Half-Day Conference in Cork Ireland for €50,” they’re just going to say “Web 2.0 Half-Day Conference.” That’s as unoriginal sounding and misleading as if I were to host mini-COMDEX.

As for Regular Expression books, I was the first one with the title Regular Expression Pocket Reference and every following author has been kind enough to choose a different title. I don’t think O’Reilly’s expectation is going to be any different.

How would you feel if you found that someone had protected the term “regular expressions” in the book market, some years after people had been publishing their own, and after it had become common currency?

I presume that someone must have used the term first, so they should have the right to protect it.

(for those in the dark, Tony Stubblebine is the author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference published by O’Reilly).

I think you’re doing an excellent job of rallying people to your side and getting attention for yourself and IT@Cork’s Web 2.0 conference. But it’s mostly bunk. You’ve chosen a copycat name for your conference. You don’t have to get into the legals of it to know that you’re in the wrong and should have been more original. I think the vitriol, much of it coming from you, is obscuring that point. I’ve posted as much on my blog.

–tony