Wednesday, August 16, 2006
When Apple owns “Pod”, what do we owe?
Apple has decided that it owns the word Pod and it intends to use legal channels to formalize that claim. For a company that was attempting to demonstrate leadership in the social media movement, it is going out of its way to prove otherwise.
I don’t know the legal system very well and I can’t begin to guess what Apple plans to do if it does win its claim on the word Pod. I do have to wonder what will happen to everyone who has a Podcast, what kind of damages a dictionary publisher will be on the hook for, and if the RIAA will treat this as an attempt to reverse engineer the book and movie versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Source: Paul Colligan
August 16th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
This could actually be good for the “podcast” community however. It would require podcasters to change to being producers of internet radio on demand, which could make more people subscribe when not using the Apple “iPod”
For more background on the my reasoning behind this, take a listen to the “PAB2006 - panel discussion” over at http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:26 am
I would imagine that all they are doing is protecting their trademark on iPod. COmpanies must do this or they lose their trademarks.
August 27th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
But… to trademark the word “Pod” seems like quite a stretch and very heavy-handed. Think of products such as the Line 6 Pod series of intrument effect products, and many other products that use the name “Pod”, that have been around long before iPods were a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eyes.
August 28th, 2006 at 7:30 am
Sure, point taken. However, if they do not try, that is evidence that they do not care about the name. This can be evidence (the lack of an attempt to protect the trademark) that would put the name ‘pod’ in the public domain. Companies do this all the time.