O'Reilly Trademarks "Web 2.0"
Dale Dougherty from O’Reilly created the term “Web 2.0” to describe the recent rebirth of web development that has brought us cleaner interfaces as well as AJAX-powered behaviors. As a part of this, O’Reilly has organized a couple of Web 2.0 conferences around the topic. Now, O’Reilly is trademarking the term “Web 2.0” and people are very angry about this. If this were a company like Microsoft, I would have no doubt that they had plans to either lock down the term in a way that nobody could use it, or they would popularize it in a self-centered way that would bring more attention to them. O’Reilly has done nothing I know of to give me a reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that they are doing this for selfish reasons. I think that it is fair that they have exclusive access to the term when it is used to describe a conference (that is all that they are requesting). Considering their history with Web 2.0 conferences, I agree with them that if I saw a conference billing itself as a “Web 2.0 Conference” that I would assume that it was an O’Reilly conference. This is the confusion that they are trying to avoid. I’m sure that O’Reilly would be pretty understanding if contacted about a conference title that used the term “Web 2.0” as a way to clarify the topic of the conference and less as a title for the event.
I'm actually glad that they have taken the step to take some ownership of this. Next thing we would know, Web 2.0 would be a menu item/feature/search/option in Internet Explorer 7 and the term would be off limits to everyone.