In conjunction with the announcement of the new Web 2.0 Expo and technical conference, I’m also pleased to report that CMP has agreed to narrow the scope of enforcement of the Web 2.0 trademark registration. It will only seek to protect the Web 2.0 trademark if another other Web 2.0-related event has a name that is confusingly similar to the names of the actual events co-produced by CMP and O’Reilly, such as our events “The Web 2.0 Conference” and “The Web 2.0 Expo.”
This is consistent with my original understanding about why the trademark filing was made. I must confess that I’ve always thought that the point was simply to protect the event names, as evidenced by the fact that we have always put the trademark notice at the end of the conference names on the website that O’Reilly produces, “The Web 2.0 Conference.”
For those of you who’ve been under a rock, and don’t know why this is news, see the entries about the flap that erupted when CMP sent a C&D letter to IT@Cork, complaining about their IT@Cork Web 2.0 Conference, not knowing that I’d already given IT@Cork my blessing when they invited me to speak. CMP learned from the flap that the right way to engage those kinds of problems in the internet era is with a friendly email or phone call, rather than a lawyer’s letter.
(I’ve been wanting to make this announcement for a while, but had to wait till the Expo (which was still in the planning and naming stages) had been launched.)