"Tweet" might be a word that has been popularized by Twitter, but that doesn't mean that the social network will be able trademark it.
According to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office documents found by blogger Sam Johnston, Twitter's application for a trademark on "tweet" has been preliminarily denied.
Twitter originally filed for the trademark on April 16. In the application, the company expressed its desire to use tweet "through the applicant's related company or licensee the mark in commerce on or in connection with the identified goods and/or services." It seemed like a standard application that, once reviewed, would make "tweet" one of Twitter's registered trademarks.
But after reviewing Twitter's application and sifting through its listing of pending applications, the Patent Office found that three companies had already applied for trademarks that contained "tweet" in their names. They were simply too close to the trademark Twitter wanted.
The Patent Office attached applications sent by those three companies--TweetMarks, Cotweet, and Tweetphoto--with Twitter's rejection notice. In that notice dated July 1, the Patent Office explained that each of those trademark applications were filed with its office before Twitter's application.
"Marks in prior-filed pending applications may present a bar to registration of applicant's mark," the office wrote.
It went on to say that Twitter's tweet mark "may be refused registration under Trademark Act Section 2(d) because of a likelihood of confusion between the two marks." It couldn't say for sure that it would be refused registration, since the three previous applications were still pending.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Patent Office notification to Twitter shows it was sent out the evening of July 1. Ironically, that morning, co-founder Biz Stone wrote a blog post citing his company's willingness to allow developers to use "tweet."
"We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter," Stone wrote on July 1. "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important."
But the events surrounding that blog post, namely that Twitter asked a developer to find a new name and user interface because of their similarity to its own service, have become even more interesting with the knowledge that "tweet" isn't a Twitter trademark.
In an e-mail sent to that developer, Twitter wrote that it was "uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own." The e-mail was made public on July 1.
Regardless of the timing, Twitter did not hold the trademark, even though its correspondence with the developer claimed it did.
Stone's blog post was written before the company apparently learned of the Patent Office's preliminary rejection notice. But it is noteworthy that in that post, Stone said that the company "applied" for the trademark. He didn't say that it was held by the company, like its correspondence claimed in the e-mail to the developer.
In either case, one thing is certain: Twitter, so far, does not hold the trademark to "tweet." And at this point, it doesn't look like the company will be getting it anytime soon--if ever.
Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.
A developer building an application using Twitter's API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter's own, as well as his use of the word "tweet" in the application's name.
The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: "Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own."
Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word "tweet," that could mean a problem for TweetDeck, TweetMeme, PoliTweets, and some of the other extremely popular businesses built atop Twitter.
A few things to keep in mind here. One, the developer was also creating a service that looked a lot like Twitter, the TechCrunch post explains, which means that the use of the word "tweet" may really have been less important than the e-mail made it out to be. Second, it's a personal e-mail coming from a Twitter employee--not a company representative or executive--which means that it may not be perfectly aligned with the company's official stance on things.
(Case in point: A Twitter investor hinted to The New York Times that the company would be making money with virtual coupons. One of Twitter's co-founders said in a comment on a blog that the investor was "brainstorming on his own.")
But the tech industry does have a history of getting into one skirmish after another over names similar to their trademarks. Several years ago, Apple started sending cease-and-desist letters to some third-party equipment companies and fan blogs that were using the word "pod" in their names. Google, too, has taken issue with the word "googling" being used as a generic verb.
And as TechCrunch points out, Twitter has filed for a trademark on the word "tweet." On the other hand, being possessive of this term (which, it goes without saying, has been a dictionary word for centuries) might not be the smartest strategy, if Twitter indeed wants to be a Digital Age communication standard "like electricity," as one executive said last month. So we'll see how this one unfolds.
UPDATE at 11:49 a.m. PT: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has, as the company's executives often do when there's a rumor flurry about something Twitter's doing, put up a blog post to clarify. The answer, not surprisingly, is that these things are handled on a case-by-case basis.
And "tweet" is not a target, he said.
"We have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter," Stone assured readers. "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet."
It's more complicated when developers choose to use the word "Twitter," though it had been a dictionary word long before the microblogging company adopted the term.
"Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well," Stone wrote. "After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with 'Twitter' we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line."
Microsoft has licensed its technical know-how to nearly every company, including rivals such as Apple and Nokia.
Now Redmond can add Google to the list. To help power the Google Sync product that was announced on Monday, the search giant has licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol for sharing information between a server and mobile phone.
Google Sync allows users to synchronize their contacts, and in some cases calendar information, with Google's Web-based services. It works with a range of phones including Windows Mobile phones, Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
Generally, companies have licensed the ActiveSync protocol to link data between a cell phone and a Microsoft Exchange server. In this case, though, Google is using ActiveSync to link Google data off of their servers to mobile phones.
Although Google and Microsoft have cooperated in some areas in the past, the deal on Monday is the first announced example of one of those companies licensing the other's intellectual property, according to Microsoft.
Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer touted the move.
"Google's licensing of these Microsoft patents relating to the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol is a clear (acknowledgment) of the innovation taking place at Microsoft," Gutierrez said in a statement. "This agreement is also a great example of Microsoft's openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property."
Gutierrez noted that the company has struck more than 500 licensing deals since it began its intellectual property-sharing push in 2003.
So, by my count, that leaves Oracle and Red Hat among big name technology companies that don't have some sort of pact with Microsoft. Anyone else have another prominent name I should add to that list?
Update, 2:05 p.m. PT: I thought it was worth checking to see if the deal between Google and Microsoft was broad enough to cover Exchange synchronizing to an Android device. "Android is not covered by this agreement," a Microsoft representative told CNET News.
Got the next big idea floating around in your head but want to see if someone else has already come up with it? Digging through the mountain of patents on file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site can be a bit daunting. To help in that search is Patents.com, which has an index of more than 450 million patents in 15 different languages. All of this is combined with an online marketplace where these patents can be bought and sold.
Like Google's patent search offering, Patents.com offers some great exploration, which is where I found the most value. The front page shows off some of the most recently approved and submitted patents, but the star of the show is the search tool, which goes from basic to "expert" mode with just one click. The expert mode gives you a whole new bag of search tricks like word proximity, a cheat sheet of commonly used patent jargon, as well as a "fuzzy" search that will look for alternate or misspelled words in patent titles or the actual copy.
One of its key improvements over the standard U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site is the image viewer, which I found far easier to use. It's essentially a PDF viewer, but it's stuck right on the page instead of opening in a new window. Also, unlike the U.S. patent office site, it does not require reloading the page each time you want to see another image. Users of Google's patent search will feel right at home.
As for the actual sale of ideas, if you're a patent owner you can claim patents on the site and, once verified, you can sell them. Patents.com includes a list price set by the patent holder, and anyone who is interested can be contacted through Patents.com. This is definitely a useful service for people who know what they're doing. Like anything that involves legality and potentially large sums of money, it's probably best to do some research before buying a patent on a site like this. The search, however, is quite a fun way to explore human ingenuity, and hopefully will lead to some fun patent discoveries from bloggers looking to unearth a major company's next big thing.
Did you know sugar could be patented? Apparently it's true for the owner of this patent, which we found while browsing Patents.com.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
As twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss power toward Wednesday's semifinal in the rowing events of the Olympics in Beijing, their longstanding court case against Facebook is winding down.
A San Jose, Calif., judge ruled late last week that ConnectU, the start-up that the brothers founded with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, must transfer its stock to Facebook as part of the settlement acquisition by Tuesday, despite the claims on behalf of ConnectU that Facebook failed to disclose its true valuation when negotiating the terms of the settlement. The start-up's founders alleged fraud on Facebook's part, and claimed that irreparable harm would ensue from the settlement going through in its present form.
Facebook had been valued on paper at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last November. But that valuation was specific to Microsoft's preferred stock and the business deal surrounding it, Facebook said. Its real valuation is between $3 billion and $4 billion--reports place it at $3.75 billion.
Judge James Ware ruled last Friday that while ConnectU's appeal can be heard, the settlement has to go through first. "The longer the court delays in enforcing the settlement between the parties, the more likely the value of the consideration subject of the settlement (i.e. the value of the stock of each company) will change," Ware wrote in his ruling. "This means that the status quo cannot be preserved with a stay."
Ware originally rejected claims of fraud in June, prompting the appeal.
ConnectU's founders are slated to receive a mixture of cash and Facebook stock as part of the settlement. They originally sued Facebook in 2004, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their code and business plan after being employed as a ConnectU software developer.
The International Herald Tribune reported on Thursday that Facebook attempted to acquire a look-alike German social network before finally suing it in a federal court last month.
StudiVZ, a German site geared toward college students, is 10 times the size of Facebook's user base in Germany. It also looks just like Facebook, with a different color scheme, which is what ticked off the site's legal team. The court complaint, which called StudiVZ "a knockoff," says "a year and a half after the debut of Facebook's Web site, (it) was built by copying the look, feel, and features of Facebook.com."
The complaint continued: "Facebook is concerned that, because StudiVZ looks like Facebook, and incorporates similar features and functionality to Facebook, users will incorrectly believe that StudiVZ is associated with Facebook."
But according to sources who spoke to the IHT, Facebook first tried to acquire StudiVZ, which would have not only quelled the problem but also bought Facebook some major inroads in the German market. Parent company Georg von Holtzbrinck, however, wasn't satisfied with what Facebook was willing to pay. The German publishing company had acquired StudiVZ for the equivalent of $134 million early in 2007 and reportedly wanted significantly more than that in a hypothetical sale to Facebook.
Intellectual-property lawsuits are nothing unfamiliar at Facebook, which was sued years ago by the creators of onetime rival ConnectU, when they alleged that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their code and business plan. Facebook settled the lawsuit by effectively acquiring ConnectU for a combination of cash and stock.
But in this case, Facebook is the one crying foul. The IHT noted that because of international borders, it's unclear where this case will be tried. But it's more clear that this case has some foundation: StudiVZ's similarities to Facebook go right on down to the "poke." On the German site, that's called "gruscheln."
In the high school cafeteria of Facebook apps, Scrabulous is like that girl who gets in trouble for showing too much skin, only to throw on a hoodie and be let back into the principal's good graces. Sort of. The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, a few original play options, a different points tabulation system, and a new name, Wordscraper.
Scrabulous' new look as Wordscraper
Props to Adam Ostrow of Mashable for picking up on this one early.
The Facebook application Scrabulous had been taken down by its creators earlier this week when Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, pointed out that Scrabulous was a near copy. Few disagreed with the allegation, but many loyal Scrabulous fans wondered why Hasbro couldn't have struck a deal instead of insisting upon a shutdown, especially as the "real" Scrabble game on Facebook succumbed to technical difficulties.
The reason for Scrabulous' extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn't that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul.
On Wednesday I spoke to Pete Kinsella, a partner at the Faegre & Benson law firm who specializes in intellectual property, and he gave me his take on the gritty details. "Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games," Kinsella explained. "What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself."
Returning as Wordscraper is a way for its creators to keep the game running while avoiding legal complaints. In effect, it's just different enough.
"I think there's a very fine line to walk in this one, and the question is whether Scrabulous went over the line or not in mimicking the colors or everything else," Kinsella assessed (keep in mind that we had this conversation before the advent of Wordscraper), "or whether they could've designed a generic version of the game with the same points system and scoring system, and that would've fallen out of Hasbro's copyrights."
So will this end the legal spat? Maybe. If Kinsella's analysis proves accurate, this is probably enough to keep Hasbro's lawyers away. Many other games on Facebook bear strong-but-not-too-strong resemblances to board games like Battleship and Risk, but so far haven't encountered the same corporate scrutiny.
"The law allows people to design around things, and particularly when there isn't patent protection, the law has great incentive to design around things by making things somewhat different," Kinsella said.
Or, for a less digital example, think about all those detergent bottle logos that look suspiciously similar.
You don't mess with Craigslist, apparently.
A fan-run blog called Craigslist Blog has been served a takedown notice from the massive classifieds site, according to a post from blogger Tim White on Thursday.
Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO
(Credit: Craigslist)White posted the e-mail he'd received from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which claimed that White's URL "craigslistblog.org" was "infringing" and that its name was "needlessly confusing to members of the media and the general public, and must be changed." Buckmaster did not demand that White stop blogging, but he did request that he stop using the domain, turn it over to Craigslist, and additionally stop posting excerpts from Craigslist on the unofficial blog.
In response, White agreed to stop excerpting Craigslist content, and the unofficial Craigslist Blog now prominently displays the phrase "(the unofficial one)" in its masthead. But White wouldn't back down on the domain.
"I think you have received bad legal counsel and that this is potentially a really bad PR move for (Craigslist)," his e-mail response to Buckmaster said, an allusion to the company's friendly, hippie image.
Buckmaster seemed none too pleased with White's response, and in a second e-mail that White posted to his blog, he reminded the blogger that Craigslist's law firm of choice, Perkins Cole, "also does intellectual property work for Google, and for a lot of other prominent companies."
When White launched the Craigslist Blog last month, Craigslist did not have its own blog. That's changed recently, as Buckmaster now authors an official Craigslist blog. A report earlier this week estimated that Craigslist's annual revenue is likely around $80 million and could be significantly higher, except that the company is "not about the money."
Update March 31, 5:07 AM PDT: The post now reflects additional commentary from Amin Ariana.
The creator of a Facebook application called Friendmates doesn't seem to be too thrilled with the social-networking site's new "People You May Know" feature, which launched earlier this week.
"This new feature and its functionality is suspiciously identical to the application I released for Facebook six months ago (albeit with limited resources)," developer Amin Ariana said in an e-mail to CNET News.com, "but it gives no credit to the original author."
Facebook has asserted that if developers apply to its FBFund grant program, there's no guarantee Facebook won't come up with something similar to their business plans. Ariana said that he did not apply for a FBFund grant for Friendmates. Facebook representatives could not comment on whether this also applies to existing platform applications.
"I believe the outcome of this and similar moves without appropriate repercussions in giving credit to developers who are coming up with innovative ideas will ultimately result in the discouragement of such developers and a diminish(ed) effect on innovative thinking," Ariana continued. "I know change cannot be stopped, but along the way giving credit to the little people underneath will be a key to success against competition."
Friendmates isn't exactly SuperPoke or Zombies. The application has only 238 daily active users, which amounts to 9 percent of those who have installed it.
It also doesn't look that similar to "People You May Know." Friendmates allows you to see which friends have the most friends in common with you, tag Facebook members whose faces you recognize, and hear from those who have recognized you. And it invites users to manually tag their friends with how well they know them in order to assess other members whom the users might know.
Additionally, business social-networking site LinkedIn has operated a feature similar to Facebook's for months now.
Amin Ariana maintained that he sees peculiar similarity in the two. "Essentially both apps are technically using common friends to extrapolate (or suggest) potential friends," he said. "The 'suggestion engine' behind them...is the exact same."
And here's some irony: Ariana, as well as Friendmates co-creators Steve Dill and Sean Erle Johnson, are all members of the Microsoft network on Facebook. Microsoft, as you probably know already, has a $240 million stake in Facebook.
But Ariana said in an e-mail that he's not formally a Microsoft employee. "I only contract with them as a software design engineer to make money to support my own small projects, which are not supported by Microsoft in any way," he wrote.
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