Seth Godin - How to protect your ideas in the digital age

Comment by Robert Vining on December 15, 2009 at 7:52am

Thanks Arno! I read Seth daily! Great stuff from a great mind!

Comment by Klas on December 15, 2009 at 9:24am

Another true believer here :)

Comment by David-Andrew on December 15, 2009 at 9:58am

Seth Godin rules!

Comment by Marcos Peebles on December 15, 2009 at 10:40am

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT, thanks for this Arno, great read. INSPIRING, Dank je!

Comment by Peter Russell on December 15, 2009 at 5:31pm

Great post Arno, good find.

I have some thoughts about this I'm working on ... probably early in the New Year.

Comment by Robert Deutz on December 16, 2009 at 3:11am

Thanks Arno, great stuff.

I'd like to add something: Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity.
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_cr...

Comment by Herman Peeren on December 16, 2009 at 6:49am

Very nice. Yes but, yes but....

I was thinking about this in relation to Joomla!: OSM was mainly created for trademark protection and copyright protection. If we wouldn't do that, then someone could for instance just registrer the Joomla! trademark and could even prevent us from using it (okay, we are creative and we'll come up with some other thing, but it might be more cost effective to have our trademark registered). It is a strange world out there, where Sun was willing to pay a billion dollars for MySql and Oracle is willing to pay the same amount for this billion dollar baby (only, as most people see it, to kill the competition).

As for copyright protection, or maybe better: copyleft protection. GPL was invented to prevent open source from being made propriety (as was done before with BSD). But all those licenses are prety worthless if nobody is going to court when someone misuses a former GPL piece of software in their own propriety software. Maybe we shouldn't worry: if someone does that, we can always be sure to still use our open source software; that is the only certainty GPL gives us. But again: look at MySql now. If the deal with Oracle will be approved by the EU, then anyone who wants to keep MySql open can still fork from the point where it was open. But I think a lot of businesses will then choose for stability and will be willing to pay Oracle for their db solutions.

In short: that blog-posting gives words to the way I think, but it might be naive to only think positively of this world; there are some realy nasty people out there and it could be a good investment to protect us against that. That was the purpose of OSM, isn't it?

Comment by Arno Zijlstra on December 16, 2009 at 7:00am

Herman, I think you should look at it like this, OSM secured the trademark but right now is making it very hard for the community to use it while that is just the group in this story that should be able to spread the word.

Spreading the word easily and freely is what will make J grow and there is very little need for OSM to be over protective about something that actually belongs to the community. They should only defend the trademark if someone is abusing the trademark.

I like BSD, nice and simple :-)

Comment by Amy Stephen on December 16, 2009 at 8:45am

Herman -

First of all, I think it's very good to have a Trademark. I'm not sure how far I would go with registration in many countries and I believe we need to add in automatic licensing for use cases we want to promote, but I support the Trademark as a useful tool to protect a community's work.

I want to say a couple of things about your comments:

"someone could for instance just registrer the Joomla! trademark and could even prevent us from using it"

I do not believe that is true. (Understand, my expertise is limited to a few hours of trademark research. hehe!)

The fact that we are using the word is what's most important. The registration process, itself, is a legal formality. We could theoretically continue using the word Joomla! without a registration and defend it's use. Having it registered makes it far easier to defend. In fact, JoomlaShack registered their TM in the US before Joomla was registered. That registration is no longer in effect.

The Trademark debate really isn't about whether Joomla! should or should not have a Trademark. I realize there are a few people who say we shouldn't, but frankly, I think that's also too extreme. Don't forget, we've only had a US Trademark for a bit over a year.

I think there's benefit to thinking about those use cases we want to promote. One example would be to encourage developers to have Web sites to support their free as in beer and free as in GPL Extensions. Let em hang the project flag automatically! Provided they don't suggest they are "official" or speak for the project, they should be able to use the mark - and we should thank 'em for contributing. It's their mark, too.

In a nutshell, for me, that's the debate on the Trademark. Add into that this frustration that there isn't a good avenue to raise those ideas without people getting their feathers all ruffled.

HAVING SAID THAT -> We are moving forward - I see good good good progress.

Comment by Herman Peeren on December 16, 2009 at 10:11am

Yes, Arno, the first 2 paragraphs of what you say is exactly how I see it too!

But I don't completely agree with you about the BSD-license, for the problem with that is that is has occurred several times that BSD-software was brought under propriety licenses and worse: the software could be patented by someone and could not be used as open source anymore. A point is, that it is, hardly possible to patent software in Europe, but things like that are big issues in the States and Japan (look at all the Google patents etc.). It was this shortcoming that originated the GPL.

Maybe we should find a place where we can still add some thoughts to the GPL-debate. For maybe not everything is said in that discussion yet. But on the other hand: it is no fun to think the way lawyers do; deadly for true creativity. me->back2Coding( );

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