Trademarks

A little update on the whole trademark fiasco on the Second Life® blog.

More On Trademarks

"We've seen some blog posts using ® after every mention of "Second Life." After the initial reference to the trademark at issue, there's no need to use the symbol again."

See? So stop it. :-p

Actually, this seems to be the best thing I've read on the issue.

"3. Is there an easy way for bloggers who focus on Second Life to take care of this? So they don’t have to worry about including a trademark symbol every time they post about Second Life?

There is. Check out the SLED Blog banner at http://www.sl-educationblog.org as an example of proper usage. This is a blog we support with a license that has a lot of great contributions by education-oriented Residents. You’ll see that under the blog name, in smaller text, there’s a descriptive byline that explains what the blog is about: “K-20 Education Using the Second Life® World.” You’ll also see that this byline takes care of the trademark symbol and the first noun after “Second Life” for the blog posts."

That means that someone like Tymmerie who has put the symbol right in her blog header wouldn't really have to use it again in any of her posts, if I'm understanding this correctly. I've changed my header as well.

If you read through the whole blog post, you also don't have to go back and change all of your previous posts. LOL You can talk about Second Life. You can say the words. The blog post that was done about trademarks previous to this one stated that very clearly. The big thing is that they don't want you pretending that you are Linden Lab. And who in their right mind would even WANT to?!

If I seem to have completely missed the point or I'm misunderstanding something, please feel free to tell me more. I know some people are saying that we don't put the trademark symbols after we use the words Pepsi or Dell or Aquafina, but just because we don't do it doesn't mean we're probably not supposed to do it.