Now It's Trademarks' Turn

I've written a fair amount about patent woes in these posts (some would probably say too much). And in many ways, patents are easy pickings, since the idiocies perpetrated by patent offices around the world are pretty obviously wrong, even to the person on the Clapham omnibus.

But trademarks are another matter. Rights and wrongs here are more slippery, since there is certainly commercial sense in allowing owners to protect brands that they may have invested considerable amounts to build up. But trademarks are not like copyright: it is not an artistic question of infringing on an expression of an idea, but rather a commercial issue of avoiding confusion in the marketplace.

So the news that the US is about to push through some changes to its trademark law that will radically re-shape what trademarks will do in areas outside commerce is bad indeed. The bill in question would remove traditional exceptions to US trademark law that concern news reporting and commentary; fair use; and non-commercial use. If these proposals become law, it will give owners of trademarks huge and totally inappropriate power over not just competitors, but the media and the public too.

Update: Here's what companies already get up to using trademarks.

Daily Me 2.0

One of the problems with blogs for advertisers is their fragmented nature: to get a reach comparable to mainstream media generally involves faffing around with dozens of sites. The obvious solution is to bundle, and that's precisely what Federated Media Publishing does. As its roster of blogs indicates, it operates mainly in the field of tech blogs, but the model can clearly be extended.

To the average blog-reader on the Clapham Ominibus (probably the 319 these days), more interesting than the business side of things is the possibility of doing blog mashups. And lo and behold, Federated has produced such a thing (note that the URL begins significantly with "tech", hinting of non-tech things to come...).

What struck me about this federated news idea is that it could be extended beyond the bundles. It would be easy - well, easy if you're a skilled programmer - to knock up a tool offering a range of newspage formats that let you drag and drop newsfeeds into predefined slots to produce the same kind of effect as the Federated Media/Tech one.

RSS aggregators already do this crudely, but lack the design element that would help to make the approach more popular. You would also need some mechanism for flagging up which stories had changed on the page, or for allowing new stories from designated key blogs to rise to the top of the dynamically-generated newspage.

The result, of course, is the Daily Me that everyone has been wittering on about for years. But it comes with an important twist. This Daily Me 2.0 is not just a cosmetic mixing of traditional medium news, but a very different kind of online newspage, based on the very different perspective offered by blogs.

One reason why Daily Me 1.0 never took off was because traditional media are simply too greedy to contemplate sharing with anyone else. Blogs have no such qualms - indeed, they have different kinds of sharing (quotations, links, comments) at their core. I think we'll be reading more about this....

He Gets It - But Not What You Think

The head of Mozilla in Europe, Tristan Nitot, has an interesting post about the French Gendarmerie National switching to both Firefox and Thunderbird. But the real story is not the obvious one of another Firefox and Thunderbird victory. After all, Firefox in particular benefits from a typical virtuous circle: the more people who use it, the greater the incentive to follow suit as more sites start adopting open Web standards.

The real kicker comes right at the end of the quotation from an interview with the man in charge of the move, Général Brachet:

Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.

Yes, he really gets it.

The real breakthrough for GNU/Linux on the business desktop will come from the combined power of the Fab Free Three: Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Once users are familiar with these programs on Windows, they will have no problem switching to GNU/Linux, since the applications - which are where they spend the vast majority of their computing time - are the same.

And just as private use of Microsoft's Office suite is largely driven by its dominance of businesses (helped by some "borrowing" of work copies to use at home), so GNU/Linux among general users will be propelled by its increasing penetration of the business market, not vice-versa.

We'll know when that is happening once large numbers of games that are currently Windows-only start appearing in GNU/Linux versions. Their absence remains probably the biggest single obstacle to converting the average person on the Clapham Omnibus to a totally open source solution. Children are Microsoft's secret weapon here. The rise of third generation consoles will also help by providing another way of satisfying the gaming urge in the Window-less family.