THIS is the automated e-mail you get if you ask for an exemption for website name.

How well did that work for them the last time they tried it on a high profile case?

Trademarks are funny things.

First let me say that I'm no lawyer and my interpretations are my own. But I've had a little experience with this sort of thing with my RL biz.

1) Trademarks aren't really granted themselves - registration (the little circle-R) is what is granted. Basically, that tells the world: hey, I'm claiming this turf and it's generally accepted - in fact I just made it reaaaally easy to look up and any reasonable claims against me have been checked and dismissed.

Can an (R) be challenged? You betcha! It's just a LOT harder to challenge that successfully.


2) Trademarks don't have to be TM or (R) or anything *at all* to be enforceable.

Here's a stupid example.

Say George Washington starts offering "CherryTree" brand axes. He sells 'em for 50 years. Everyone has a CherryTree axe from George. His ads litter the gutters.

Say Honest Abe then comes out and offers "CherryTree" axes. He even adds a TM to imply he's claiming the name. Maybe even the trademark office guy is asleep at his desk, and accidentally grants him an (R). George has provable history, and is gonna smack down Honest Abe with ease.


3) Trademarks *have* to be defended or... they aren't trademarks any more.

Say George in the above example blows off the Honest Abe guy - not a big threat. But then say Mr Grant, Mr Hoover and Mr Nixon all start selling CherryTree axes. And keep at it a while.

Finally George gets fed up and tries to get an injunction on all of them. The judge says: "Sorry George - you were asleep at the wheel - axes aren't even called axes any more, they are generally called CherryTrees now! Go take a walk, you are late to your own party." Classic case in point: "zipper" should have been a trademark, but it wasn't defended properly.

* * * * *


Regarding SLExchange, SLUniverse et al... and many others.

Hey, I think most people recognise that these guys have been a big part of the SL experience.

Believe me, I'm not Cristiano's biggest fan - but this is a very raw deal, if it is going to mess with SLUniverse and Cristiano's efforts to date.

I don't know if he makes a profit off SLUniverse but even if he does, whatever profit he makes falls ridiculously far short of the effort he has put in. He's been an incredible, passionate supporter of the Company, even when taking the Project OpenLetter protest into account.

Snapzilla, his product line early on... all that stuff was the very sort of content that drew in the millions in the first place, and made the grid a happening place.

I'm no lawyer - I know enough to think that yeah, the Company *has* to take steps a), b) and c) or whatever the United States law requires to establish 'adequate evidence of defence' of a trademark. Or they could lose it.

I would hope - I'm not clear on this point myself - I would hope that all they have to do is sabre-rattle a bit at Christiano, then not press it with him - maybe that would give the Company enough grounds in the case of really needing to smack down a real usurping competitor 1000x more of a threat than Cristiano someday. I don't know.

It seems like an unfortunate mess, and if it messes with Apotheus, Cristiano, Travis, Prokofy and a zillion others... it may ultimately be far more harm than good. I remember how zealously Apple defended its rights, only to see IBM pwn them in the long run by having a more relaxed attitude.

With the client viewer open sourced and the serverside software possibly to follow, it's going to be a real mashup of super-relaxed and super-uptight.

Like Chip says, all of this should have been done years ago.

Much as I'm not cool on feting early adopters, this is a huge, public exception I'd make: grandfather in all these guys on a limited renewable licence or something.

Get the trademark under control, but get Company hands down into the grass-roots soil and admit: yeah, these guys helped us.

It wouldn't be playing favourites at this late stage. It would be just plain playing fair.

Desmond, I agree with all the points you were making, but let me use your example for what I was saying.

Georgie can make CherryTree axes all day long, and tenaciously go after everyone else that tries to make CherryTree axes. But if he only gets the trademark registered with respect to axes, he can't do anything about Abe's CherryTree Desert Topping & Floor Polish business. He can't even go after Spiro's CherryTree Sharpening Stones.

Unless you're business is in one of the fields that LL claims for that trademark (assuming it actually gets registered), LL can't legally do anything about it. You can be SLblog.com or SL Ballet and they can't do anything if you aren't in the business of creating virtual worlds or sending messages to/from virtual worlds.

Yeah, I didn't feel need to add to what you had explained there.

What I'm worried about though, is that the SL- related sites under consideration aren't exactly about other things, they do reference Second Life in one way or another.

It's a sticky thing. I wonder how fan fiction sites handle it? It's hard to be a Star Trek or a Harry Potter fansite without saying Star Trek or Harry Potter *somewhere* in there...

The other fansites are easily smacked down on copyright issues. Since LL isn't creating the copy inside SL, they lack the copyrights (unless you make a fansite about the Linden characters or perhaps a story set on Linden owned land). Site's referencing Second Life do not fall under LL's 'SL' trademark application as of the last filing with the PTO unless the site is for a business that is actually in competition with SL.

The new rules about what's allowable and what's not for SL related domains seems pretty arbitrary with the whole "two nouns" thing. I'm sure there must be some legal basis for it, but damned if I know what it is. Asking fan sites that have been around for years, long before LL decided to trademark SL, to rename themselves and get new domains seems like going a bit overboard. They should exempt existing sites as long as they use a boilerplate that says "SL, Second Life, and Grid are registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. We are not affiliated with them..." or whatever such things should say, and add the appropriate TMs in their mastheads and copyright info. I'll be surprised if they don't work something out with SLU, SLX, and other notable long running sites.

I don't think so.

A Linden staffer changed it to SL to save space, borrowing SL from user's usages at sites like SLExchange and SLUniverse.

It used to be Second Life Forums.

Not only that but read it:

Please be aware that we're unlikely to grant special requests to use our trademarks in ways not allowed in the Second Life Brand Center, except in limited cases that are strategic for our business. It's nothing personal---it's just what we need to do to protect our trademarks.

strategic for our business
strategic for our business
strategic for our business

I don't see how any site that bitches constantly about LL as I see in some threads over on some other forums is "strategic for their business". If anything they would want to shut it down to keep investors and potential clients from reading the junk.

Bitching about LL will get them closed down? Well, say 'bye to this forum then.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website (uspto.gov), Linden Research registered 'SL' as a trademark on June 5, 2007 (number 77198345). I should think anyone who can prove he or she was using 'SL' as part of a website name before that date would have a pretty strong claim to it.

what about these sites/companies (just a randomly search on google TM/R or what else does google want's to use):

www.slsknet.org (soulseek a peer to peer program that is there for more time than June 5, 2007)

www.slk.com (Pear, Leeds and Kellogg) (not related with Mercedes SLK that was constructed in 1997)

www.slkelectronics.com

www.slk-law.com (an american law firm)

Then what's stopping them? Isn't there a dispute process for trademarks?
People who think they have some right to use it for whatever reason should go dispute it if they have the balls. If not, then maybe they should consider the stfu option.

/sarcasm on

That would be horrible!

/sarcasm off