O'Reilly Lawyers Set Up Shop in the Patent Office

theodp writes "On the same day Netizens fumed over the trademarking of Web 2.0 (R), lawyers for O'Reilly were beating a path to the USPTO to file for a trademark on MAKER FAIRE, lest some Irish scallywag try to co-opt that catchy phrase for a conference. Speaking of NETIZENS, USPTO records show O'Reilly once sought a trademark for that term. And while details are sketchy, USPTO records also indicate that O'Reilly not only sought to trademark the term WEBSITE, it was the plaintiff in a scheduled Trademark Trial involving a defendant who laid claim to the phrase WEB CITE."

In all seriousness...

[Mongoose Disciple]

When did O'Reilly stop being about making quality books and stuff and start being about creating buzzwords and catchphrases (Web 2.0, bleh.) and trademarking them?

There was a time when I'd buy an O'Reilly book to learn a new technology; now I mostly just find resources on the web via Google. I half-seriously wonder if lots of other developers made the same transition and eroded O'Reilly's original and sane-seeming business model.

Re:In all seriousness...

[Stringer Bell]

I was surprised by the general shittiness of Ruby In a Nutshell [oreilly.com]. I found it difficult to use to actually learn ruby. On a co-worker's recommendation, I picked up a copy of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide [pragmaticprogrammer.com], which I've been much more happy with.

That's the first O'Reilly book I've encountered that's been so thoroughly unsatisfactory. A shame, really. I'd like to believe this is an exception to the rule rather than the harbinger of a general downard trend in the quality of O'Reilly books.

C != the whole world

[tepples]

You just assigned Trademark Office to Patent Office.

Not everybody codes in C. Some code in Pascal or other languages where assignment is represented as := or <=. Some code in dialects of LISP where let and set! are used for creating variables. Some code in BASIC where = in an expression context means equality but = in a statement context means assignment. Some people code in Java, where using an assignment in the condition of an if or while loop results in a compile error of no automatic cast to boolean. Some people code for a C compiler that warns in the same case, such as GCC with -Wparentheses [gnu.org].

Wrong purpose.

[raehl]

Protecting business investments is the purpose of trademarks.

Protecting the consumer's ability to identify the source of goods and services is the purpose of trademarks.

Re:This is all just so ludicrous.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

"Apple" is perhaps an unfortunate example, being the name of both a computer company and a music company whose worlds collided with the invention of iTunes...

Re:These make sense

[Bing Tsher E]

It's an interesting historical note to mention that the company that really, really disliked O'Reilly's 'Website' package (an all-in-one-retail-box method of rolling out a website in the early days) was Microsoft. It was a Web Server package that you could install on any plain old version of Windows NT. Microsoft didn't like this because they wanted to sell server versions of NT, and expensive client access licenses. They didn't WANT people being able to put a cheap NT Workstation online and use somebody else's software to make it a Web Server.