Valleywag
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill tells me that his photo sharing site got a TiVo nastygram:
Karen Kramer from TiVo tried to Cease & Desist one of our customers today. We have a feature called PhotoRank that lets anyone (SmugMug customer or not) rank a photo by clicking thumbs up & thumbs down icons.Apparently, TiVo thinks they own all use of the concept of a thumbs up being positive and a thumbs down being negative. Shaking in my boots (ha!), I went to the USPTO and discovered that they do, indeed, have trademarks on 'Thumbs Up' and 'Thumbs Down'.
But they're very narrow trademarks, specifically for interactive television and remote controls:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=qo3bti.2.39
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=qo3bti.2.40How exactly does SmugMug have anything to do with interactive television or remote controls? I wonder if Digg or any of the other bajillion sites using thumbs up / down are getting C&D'd too?
Valleywag will ask the founders of Digg and Consumating tonight, if Valleywag is still sober enough to talk.
Comments
Ebert and Roeper might have something to say to this.
first of all, the new tivo would be NOTHING without the brilliant mind of arthur van hoff, god of yesteryear and hypertext news and all of that...but i'm not sure who came up with the idea of thumbs up and thumbs down, just proof that people will fight about anything (tm) because they don't know when to pick their battles (tm), and also (c)2006, tivo is really desperate for revenue, so maybe (tm) this is like a 'revenue through litigation' (all rights reserved) strategy (c 2006)
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