1. Flickr is taking full responsibility for a bad personal decision (not Yahoo decision)

2. It’s been resolved as far as I can tell with Rebekka.

3. There seem to be a heckuvalotta people just angry…and it seems that nobody could apologize enough. Some of those people have vested interests in keeping people angry. Others may just need to have some time and space put between the incident and their healing.

Yahoo has never been my personal darling. I’m just as suspicious of that company as I am with any other bloated large corporation. Flickr, though, I know they are human beings with hearts and souls. I suppose knowing them personally makes me biased.

Tara, where is your Web 2.0 darling now?

All the Ajax and Creative Commons licensing in the world won’t save you if you’re an asshole (you meaning, of course, Yahoo, not you, Tara, you’re a sweetheart).

Brand dilution (as it’s typically defined) deals with adding brand extensions and thus “diluting” the core brand.

Common Usage deals with a brand that gets to a point where Coke = any soft drink, Google = any search engine, Xerox = any copier, or Yo-Yo = a specific toy.

The first is a business issue, the second is a legal issue. Brand dilution is a decision made by the company as to where and how they want to extend the brand, based on whatever overall effect that might have on the business.

The second is a legal issue, as has been pointed out, where the theory of “don’t use it, lose it” comes into play. If you don’t send out the “Don’t use my brand name to mean the industry”, then you have a hard time winning court cases where people are putting “Coke” on cans of some random non-Coca Cola produced soft drink.

I’m guessing here, but perhaps your point was this:

Brands don’t get diluted simply by creating brand extensions, they become diluted when those brand extensions are irrelevant to their audience.

?

I also think that they could, at some point, tackle dilution (through the use of “googling” as a generic) with some clever advertising that highlights/spoofs the concept. Wouldn’t that be fun to see? I can imagine all sorts of amusing skits/ads/commercials.

I agree with Sean McBride’s comments. The current US (and I think around the world) trademark law requires company to send out those silly legal letters to warn people of inappropriate use. If they don’t, sooner or later, their trademarks will start to loose their protective power and their brands becomes generic.

As an aside, here are my 2 cents on google’s trademark that I wrote last August,
Search for “google guerrilla marketing” on my blog

To show how “serious” Google was about these legal letters, Google used this as an example in their “legal letters”.
“Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.
Inappropriate: He googles himself.”
(big smile)

Now, if you are arguing that trademark is an outmoded form of protection, then it is a different matter. In fact, I’ve been using “ideas Revolution” as my company’s name without much formal action (other than a .com website). And I don’t have much plan to trademark it.

For me, my turning point came when I saw how the issues surrounding the Web 2.0 trademark/service mark registration were started, mishandled and handled by Tim, et al. (For some info, see Wikipedia Web 2.0 entry (in particular the Trademark section) and Tim’s own postings). The Web 2.0 trademark mess has shed light on the limitation of trademark in a Web 2.0 world. I highly recommend those care about IP protection re: trademark to read up on the stories surround the Web 2.0 trademark/service mark registration, it is a good “case study”.

Mind you, I am a firm believer of fence-sitting. So I may still use trademarks as tools in the future but they are not absolute tools as shown by Tim’s “Web 2.0″.

Cheers,
Kempton

First of all, I agree with Sean McBride’s comments. The current US (and I think around the world) trademark law requires company to send out those silly legal letters to warn people of inappropriate use. If they don’t, sooner or later, their trademarks will start to loose their protective power and their brands becomes generic.

As an aside, here are my 2 cents on google’s trademark that I wrote last August,
http://kempton.wordpress.com/2006/08/19/google-a-verb-guerrilla-marketing/

Just so we know how serious Google view these letters. Here is one example that Google used in their “legal letter”
“Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.
Inappropriate: He googles himself.”
(big smile)

Now, if you are arguing that trademark is an outmoded form of protection, then it is a different matter. In fact, I’ve been using “ideas Revolution” as my company’s name without much formal action (other than a .com website). And I don’t have much plan to trademark it.

For me, my turning point came when I saw how the issues surrounding the Web 2.0 trademark/service mark registration were started, mishandled and handled Tim, et al. (For some info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Trademark and Tim’s own postings). The Web 2.0 trademark mess has shed light on the limitation of trademark in a Web 2.0 world. I highly recommend those care about IP protection re: trademark to read up on the stories surround the Web 2.0, it is a good “case study”.

Cheers,
Kempton

I have been dealing with this issue a lot lately, in a number of different conversations, so this is not only very perfectly stated, it is also quite timely for me personally.

Thanks for the inspiration (again).

Adobe does this with Photoshop and “photoshopping” too. There was a post on Reddit recently about it, I think.