Over 15 years ago I got a threatening letter because I created a guide called "Library Jargon" and offered it up via FTP, gopher and email. Some rinky-dink company claimed they had a trademark and copyright to it.  I wrote them back after doing a search via gopher on the tphrase in question and found over 200 other documents with the same title.  I sent the search results to them and never heard from them again.

Bill Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Roy Tennant
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 9:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Patents and open source projects

I once got a "cease and desist" letter from a legal firm defending someone's trademark for "metadata". I mean, seriously. Perhaps obviously, I ignored it. It's still in my files somewhere.
Roy



On Dec 6, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Ironically, I had (or there was) some trouble with the term "MyLibrary@NCState". Granted, the term was originally a variation of My Netscape, My Yahoo, and My Deja News, but all sorts of things followed it, like MyiLibrary, the Google Books My Library, and then there was a ALA thing. I'm not necessarily saying MyLibrary was the leader here, but an example of how trademarks (monikers) can be used, abused, and morphed. --Eric Morgan