Podcast: Our Legal Panel Sounds Off on Cease and Desist Letters, Intellectual Property Issues and More

Our law panel truly has a lot to say. Kevin O’Keefe, Buzz Bruggeman and Phil Mann recently sat down for a podcast interview with (Blog Business Summit sponsor) PR Web’s Terri Kay was a terrific showcase of the larger issues they’ll be covering in their panel at the end of day one of our upcoming conference.

And here’s some more interesting legal commentary from our speakers. Not to rehash old news with regard to the Apple/PodcastReady cease and desist letter, but I thought this was worth posting as it gives a good sense of the kind of legal expertise we’ll be featuring on the legal panel.

For those of you who didn’t hear about it, about a month ago Apple sent what Wired called a “nastygram” to PodcastReady asserting that they held a trademark on the term “pod”. The letter called on them to cease and desist use of the term immediately.

“This is a classic example of why business people ‘love’ their lawyers,” wrote our legal panelist Phil Mann. “The lawyers here may be legally right, but do their actions really make business sense?”

The enhanced communications platform of the blogosphere inhibits the old top-down control over a brand. People use the term “google” as a verb in the same way that they used to refer to tissues as “kleenex,” adhesive first aid strips as “band-aids” and copies as “xerox.”

“Let’s assume ‘pod’ and ‘podcast’ are legally protected and Apple can indeed prohibit their unauthorized use,” continued Mann. “Great. The rest of the world then stops referring to ‘pods’, ‘podcast’ and ‘podcast ready.’ And what happens next? Some competitor without the same name recognition steps up and says, ‘I’ll be happy to let you use MY name without any complaint from me,’ and a small, unknown player gets far better free advertising than it could ever hope to buy. This isn’t that far-fetched. Many companies have stupidly handed incredibly lucrative gifts to their competitors through short-sighted emphasis on ‘protecting’ their legal rights.”

The lesson here seems to be that companies have to be careful to tread the line between keeping traditional control over their brand and opening a door for their competitors to use the social media echo chamber to amplify their own brand.

This is the kind of practical information that our attendees will learn at the upcoming conference. Our remaining seats are going fast, so you should be sure to register now.