O’Reilly continues to bungle Web 2.0 trademark issue

Earlier this week, we enforcing that trademark against a non-profit tradeshow.

O’Reilly has now responded twice to the multitude of bloggers covering this story. In their first post, they apologized for not contacting the non-profit agency in Ireland, but did not back away from using trademark law to “protect” their trademark.

In their second post, O’Reilly’s VP of Communications wrote:

Donagh Kiernan of IT@Cork (to whom the letter was addressed) graciously talked with me late in the work day on a Friday (Irish time), and we’ve resolved the service mark issue. O’Reilly and CMP are fine with IT@Cork using “Web 2.0” in the name of their June 8 conference. And I apologized again to Donagh for the tone of our letter, and for that fact that we didn’t contact IT@Cork before sending it. That’s not the way we want to do business, and as a few of you (OK, more than a few) have noted, it was a mistake.

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O’Reilly conference partner John Battelle also responds.

The real issue here isn’t about defending trademarks, I’m all for that. It’s the fact that O’Reilly went out and tried to trademark what I believe we all perceive as a common term – Web 2.0. That’s almost like trademarking the term ‘Blog’ – it shouldn’t be legal.