Jason Schramm registered the domain Paul Biba over at TeleRead.org defends Amazon’s move:
As to trademarks, which “Kindle” is, the courts have held over and over again, with no equivocation, that if a trademark owner does not enforce their registrations then the owner will lose the registration and the mark will go into the public domain. There are many examples of this happening. Perhaps the most famous is “aspirin,” which started out as a trademark but the owner didn’t enforce it and so it passed into generic use.
Paul says that while people may perceive this as the “big guy hitting on the little guy,” if the bug guy doesn’t do this hitting, “then the big guy loses his trademark just as those who owned these trademarks lost theirs: aspirin, cellophane, nylon, thermos, escalator.” Google too has used similar tactics in the past, a blog post of his argues, “I understand they need to protect their copyrights and trademarks, but there has to be another way. They risk losing a lot of goodwill from Amazon fans. They appear to be slowly working through Kindle news sites at least, so if they haven’t reached you yet they will soon.”
[Thanks Jason!]
*Disclosure: I’m not part of Federated Media Publishing anymore, but they had a deal that put blog content on Kindle, and the blog authors in the FM network got some percentage of the subscription fee (I opted out of this deal before it really materialized when opting out of FM last year).Suggest a Correction
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