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When a brand name being the proper name of a product, service or company becomes a common noun it means that your brand was able to get a first class seat in history. Your product has achieved the status of an icon. It actually became a part of a lot of people’s common sense (hence the label common noun) about the world.

We do photoshop our pictures now (we never ever say we microsoft photoedit our pictures) and we make podcast all the time. We did edit our pictures long before AdobePhotoshop and we did broadcast our audio on the web long before your iPods even exist. But people all over the globe “chose” to use your brand names to refer to these activities. In fact, your marketing departments, your engineers, your designers, your brandheroes made us choose these names to refer to these activities. The fact that we are using these terms in a general way is thus a sign of their marketing/branding/economic power. That’s something to be proud of!

So Applonies, don’t complain about your brand names being used in a more common way. You made us use them in this way.

I suggest these people at apple get in touch with some linguists who can explain them that language is something organic, growing and changing and adapting in a way which one can hardly control.

You can never get everlasting global and total control over the way people write, the way people think or the way people speak. You can give them directions (e.g. dictionaries, formalities, codes,…) and influence our speach very profoundly but that’s really it. It usually takes you a lot of years and a hell lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.

Still, these directions, rules and regulations can be very tight and strict. They can be enforced by some one with great economic, military, moral or political power. These people can make people change their language. Dominant languages are still whiping out dialects and other languages every single day.

By the way, who invented the word apple and allowed this company to “steal” it from our common language anyway. If they want to be consistent, they should sue the authors of the bible and of any other book containing the word apple.

What do you think?

Maybe we should come up with a different name. I also like the idea that “pod” means “portable on-demand”.

Apple needs to get over themselves. This is just going to backfire on them, iFeel.

I have been podcasting for over a year, I got asked recently to speak to a group of Tech leaders here in Arizona this winter. About no less podcasting. Well I don’t claim to know everything about it so of course I have done my research to make sure I can answer all the questions. One thing was the real term for podcast: Portable On Demand Broadcast. I can’t see how Apple can win this one.

Can’t wait to see ya again at the Expo this week C.C!

Corporations are in business to make money and dominate markets. Corporate lawyers are the “button men” in the corporate world.

Old story-new buzzwords.

As a lawyer, I know this is about protecting market share and intellectual property, but it is stupid and self defeating because:

Brands should want to become so iconic they become a noun- Jello; Kleenex; Bandaid; Windex; ipod-
They all have the same things in common. They are the product, and the class of similar products-other brands don’t have the same consumer presence. No one calls an ipod an mp3 player, although it is. We all need a tissue, but we ask for kleenex. Podcasting takes advantage of itunes; most of us take advantage of itunes as a major source of distribution to ourselves and the masses, although other podcast aggregators work, too. A huge percentage of listeners get our shows through itunes- we are providing itunes with free content, and they should just be gracious about it.
I can see “iPodder” and “mypodder” crossing the line of possible infringement, but I doubt the term podcasting itself will make it as a trademark-I think I heard it was about to become a dictionary term. I’ll do some research, and maybe we can submit a friends of the court (Amicus) brief on behalf of Podcast Ready. I’ve done this before, and we should be able to do it- even as a loose “Trade Assocation” of podcasters, if the legal guys at Podshow aren’t already willing to do this.
Let me know- and I’ll unleash the legal research tools at my disposal.

1. Apple has Trademarked the term “iPod”.
2. People apparently use the term Podcast since it invovkes the idea of an iPod and creates stronger recognition than it otherwise would.

Trademark has to be vigorously defended or you lose it. If you allow anybody to use your trademarked terms without challenge, you lose the ability to challenge somebody else. Try calling it a CokeCast and see how long it takes before some lawyers from Atlanta give you a call. Not because they really care, but because if they don’t defend the infringement in one case, they lose the ability to defend it in any case.

Apple probably doesn’t care about 99% of Podcast content either, but it Podcast implies iPod and Apple support they need to distance themselves from content that others may find objectionable.

So… is iPod == Pod? Unless you can all really believe that it means something else (and I like Joe C’s idea), Apple may have a case.