Comments on: Whose Conversation Is It Anyway?

By: Intellectual Property Issues in 2009 « NET(net), Inc.

Intellectual Property Issues in 2009 « NET(net), Inc. — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:10:36 +0000

[...] in 2009 April 7, 2009, 9:32 am Filed under: trademark Prompted by an interesting post by James Governor on the subject of IP ownership of brands, names and even posts made through social networking sites [...]

By: 7 Years To Secure A Domain Name: a tale of web identity. Consolidating RedMonk for the Web Squared

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:39:20 +0000

[...] Then Twitter came along. And Steven Ivy registered the username RedMonk. Before we did. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth from yours truly. But Steve had every right to register any name he wanted. Things got even worse when GetSatisfaction came along. You see GetSatisfaction is a web service that tracks mentions of your company, so you can offer customer service to the conversations around your brand. Its a place for people to talk about brands they’re interested in. It can be useful for corporate FAQs and so on. But “RedMonk” kept throwing up false positives. I wrote about the issue in a piece called Whose Conversation Is It Anyway. [...]

By: monkchips

monkchips — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:03:40 +0000

@wendyslea how to be awesome: help weed out false positives (people vs businesses) http://bit.ly/VVZ3F got your @name from a @jowyang tweet

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » Cloudforce 2009: On Salesforce and Crowd Sourcing by Cloud Sourcing

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:53:26 +0000

[...] manager, mentioning a post I had recently written on the subject of customer influencer clouds, Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? Scott is very savvy and real time clouded me by simply saying: “I just read it.” All [...]

By: SavioRodrigues

SavioRodrigues — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:07:35 +0000

@monkchips a great post - and why there can be only one RedMonk — Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://bit.ly/f2HGH

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: James Governor

James Governor — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:45:56 +0000

Jeff- ToS are “more accurate”. i disagree. they are generally over-reaching, surprisingly ambiguous, and are rarely tested. Providers accept no liability, consumers suck it all up. Reminds me of a bailout. And while you say they are “accurate” – i don’t believe we have seen many legal test cases around IP ownership. If Facebook actively tried to claim ownership of one of my blogs, say, just because i posted something on its service I think they’d really struggle to make it stick.

often the ToS asserts over-arching rights not because the service actually wants to assert them, but because they are “necessary for running the service”. i have seen this patterns again and again and again. vendor is always surprised someone “read it like that.”

And finally I am clearly *not* complaining too hard. i wrote the piece because i think the issues are important. The question of redmonks was included to help explain the issue.

By: labsji

labsji — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:25:28 +0000

Convergence of Brands, tags, nicknames.. @monkchips Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://bit.ly/f2HGH #bananapeel

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Mrgareth

Mrgareth — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:23:35 +0000

Reading and Tagging an interesting article by @monkchips on “who owns the conversation” : http://bit.ly/iGZUw

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Hualani

Hualani — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:49:11 +0000

James Governor’s Monkchips » Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://tinyurl.com/d4wvsl

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:09:21 +0000

Hi James. I think it is an interesting question – but I’m a little worried by how easily you dismiss the service provider’s ToS’s that claim ownership… they’re more accurate than most would like to believe.

The truth is that while you “own” whatever it is you write (at least in the US and other Berne Convention signatory nations), you can easily grant a license (of varying nature). So posting on FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and even on some blog services (if you don’t host your own), could grant the service provider a very open license to whatever you write. So while you can retain “ownership”, the license could be perpetual – even if you remove your original writing.

But this is a different argument than name ownership – and gets even more tricky when you start talking about trademarks. And given the additional issue of you being in the UK and Steve in the US (and the fact that neither of you seems to have registered ANYTHING with regards to the use of the term redmonk), well, I’m supposing that’s because of your “answer is to look for friendly ways to deal with stuff.”

The reality though is that IP isn’t going anywhere – so if you don’t want to avail yourself of the currently available options, then you can’t complain too hard when something like this happens.