Blogosphere around our beautiful world today is buzzing about the new trademark policy about using the name of the company who provides the platform for it, it's logos and the name of the world itself. In short, that company based in San Francisco now insists that we put ugly ™ and ® wherever we mention them or the platform we live on. I am too lazy to read all the lawspeak they rumble there so this post is not going to be informative in that (if in any) way.
Maybe you have noticed that I rarely write the words "second life" with capital letters. That is not because I am usually lazy to use shift on my keyboard. From time to time, I press that key and that is happening when I am talking about the platform, an actual product of a certain company. In those cases, now I have to put an ugly sign after the words. By the way, those capital letters and being so retentive about terms and slight distinctions in the terms is what happens to you when you study Aristotle (the Greek guy not the company involved in data collecting) in youth.
But most of the times, I am talking about second life, something that is going on not only on aforementioned platform but also on and thanks to WordPress, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, email… Something that is based on Internet before and after all. Something that is not a product in the capitalistic sense.
I am talking about something that is live due to its residents, you, me, those avatars that fly, walk and talk around, even those whose last name is Linden. (Hmmm, should I put ™ behind last names too?) And that life, that we conveniently call "second" is not anybody's intelectual property than ours. And it is not anybody's trademark. And there is no legal and/or moral way to insist that ™ badge must be attached to it. Does anybody remember of the Your World – Your Imagination thing?
You are so right. I still won’t put trademarks on my crap. -.- Too much work and I have better things to do in my FL and SL than to do that.
-Portia <3
/me applauds for writing a whole article about the new trademark policy without mentioning the concerning trademarks once :D
And I completely agree with you – didn’t I once write a blogpost about my first, second and third life? By now, I actually think that your interpretation is more accurate: our second life is the whole life we are living on the net, and not only in SecondLife.
Portia, indeed there is a hell lot of better things to do thatn thinking about their small letters fetishes. :p
Zippora, it was like walking the mine field. I agree with you that blogging and everything else we do is far beyond the platform they are providing. It is ugly to know that suddenly somebody doesn’t feel the same about that successful symbiosis we lived for years.
I figure I’ll just use “viritual world” generically, or “Caledon” or “Wyre” if I want to be specific, and “the Company” if I want to be euphemistic. I’m not too anxious about infringeing a trademark when blogging or commenting, but at this point I don’t see any reason why I should do their marketing for them.
The bobba we won’t! (Note to self: stop using Habbo-originated words) It finally made me crack and write a post myself at my blog. (Sorry for advertising though :-S) Great post you wrote here, very interesting and written very nicely :-)
Otenth, it’s funny how all of a sudden, they made us thinking that we are doing them marketing. Surely, it wasn’t the best way to build better relationship with own customers.
Smiley, I don’t dare to think what “bobba” means. But, are there any requests by hotel management to put TM after it? :D
@Dan: No, lol, it’s their replacement word for censored. Sounds better to say “What the bobba???” than “What the *BEEP*???” :-)
I’ve written up some handy hints on trademark law and how it applies. Basically, it’s perfectly within the bounds of fair use to use Second Life without any kind of TM after it, unless you’re using it in a commercial context and as long as there’s no danger of anyone thinking your use of it means you’re sponsored by, associated with, or working on behalf of Linden Lab.
Think of newspapers as a good example: if they HAD to put “TM” after every trademark they reported on, there would be no room for any actual stories.
Thanks for that link and post. It’s very insightful and clears lot of doubts. It makes me wonder why PR’s of LL cannot do that themselves. It is *their* best interest not to make confusion. Surely, they knew what reactions they will provoke.
I don’t think they actually did think of the reaction it would provoke – community relations is something that they’re just not very good at.
It’s classic Lab. The “inSL” programme is a great idea, as it gives real world businesses cleaar guidelines about how to promote their in-world activities without using LL trademarks (which the average corporate lawyer gets very worried about). Yet they announce it in a way that suggests the only way you can say “Second Life” is with their permission – something that’s clearly wrong.
Yes, classic LL screwup. You have to do something, you do it almost good and then fuck it down to the bottom with one single blog post. Do they have some training for that or use natural talent? My mom could tell what will happen.
“Do they have some training for that or use natural talent?”
Ha ha ha, that cracked me up. Love your blog, BTW.
Agree with Ian on so many levels. I was up in arms about this at first, got into work, saw loads of brands in front of me and realised it was a marketing tie in they were talking about, not a generic you must always refer to us in this fashion.
Now I can see why they were reluctant to point this out but if for once in their lives Linden Lab would engage in some prior discussion (and giving people 90 days to comply is not prior discussion) then a lot of this could have been avoided.