I see a parallel between Twitter’s approach to its trademark and the more modern view that you don’t turn off critical thinking just because you see something in print.

In Twitter’s case, they know that most of their target market is savvy enough to know what services are being provided by Twitter themselves and what services are being provided by other third parties. This is in line the the more modern view that belief in what you read, hear, or see lies on a “trust continuum” rather than just a binary “I trust this completely” or “I don’t trust this completely”.

For example, the newspapers bemoan the popularity of blogs, saying that blogs can’t be trusted. Disregarding for a moment the failures in trust by the newspapers in recent history, what they don’t get is that it’s just natural for people who grew up with the Internet to view blogs or anything else online using their critical thinking skills. In other words, just because we see something in print, it doesn’t mean we automatically trust it like our parents or grandparents tended to do.

This is what freaks out the lawyers of the newspapers and the lawyers of companies, unlike Twitter, who believe that any unauthorized reference to their company name will render potential customers into a state of catatonic confusion. They basically think you’re too stupid to make a judgement for yourself.

by Anonymous Coward – Apr 27th, 2009 @ 10:30am

“Keep in mind that lawyers have to keep working. If they didn’t continue to bring lawsuits like these, we would suddenly find that we had way too many lawyers with no way to make money.”

Is that a chicken and egg situation or dilemma. Lawyers and lawsuits, over-aggressiveness, trademark protection. The chickens, the lawyers and the eggs the lawsuits and all the other stuff.

Is there any real reason i.e. a good business decision, that a lawsuit, a trademark protect, should be brought forth or because there are lots of lawyers and necessity demands that should not be left idle, let hatch more eggs, more lawsuits and etc.,

Clearly, as the host points out

” … seeing how much damage has been done to Monster’s brand (and now Wikipedia’s brand) for taking the legal stance, in addition to the positive way in which people view Twitter’s brand, these examples should (hopefully) make some of those trademark protectionists think twice.”

… damage caused to lawsuiting companies, it is not a good business decision, or the only good about it, is the business lawyers get and the profits they make.

But apart from good or bad business decisions for any of these individuals, their acts are noising up people’s lives and especially distract, disorient all those fine lawsuit-raising individuals, from their actual duties, that the main purpose of their companies mere existence, is not the monies they’ll put in their pockets, that’s the least of the worries of any of the rest of us, but instead the betterment of their service or product for the people to enjoy.

Nah, the societies can do without lawyers and lawsuits. Whatever has been created should be freely available for all to enjoy

I totally agree.

I dropped buying from Sony, RIAA, MPAA, Metallica, Prince and many others because of their actions on over-protection.

The whole world is watching, and it seems, FINALLY acting.

copyrights, trademarks, and patents are mostly administrative tags on creations and don’t necessarily spur economic output. it’s the value that consumers put on the product or service that generates that. and certainly a focus on filing the respective paperwork could retard actual progress in development. for Twitter not to go gangbusters like ASCAP (please see my article: http://bustedkeys.com/ascap-at-it-again-on-the-attacks) in the music industry is a smart way to go since they realize the social aspect of its app. administration and monetization can come later since the potential is clearly there. the old school has yet to be fully hip to this game but that will change in time as they understand such concepts as open source, crowdsourcing, et al.