Cory Doctorow takes on trademarks in his latest Guardian column:
And that’s where it all starts to go wrong. Trademark holders inevitably consider themselves to be trademark owners. They don’t enforce their marks to protect the public, they do it to protect their profits (this is by design). Trademark starts from the assumption that the public makes an association between a product and a service on the basis of commerce: if I see Gillette on a disposable razor, that’s because Gillette is the company that thought of putting the word “Gillette” on a line of products, and its creativity and canny marketing have made the association in the public’s mind.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
Cory Doctorow takes on trademarks in his latest Guardian column: