Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Trademark Problem?


Dear Danah Boyd,
While reading your article, "A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space", I think that you make a fair point in saying: "I believe that any company that doles out unique identifiers needs to have strong policies in place, not simply to protect trademark owners, but to balance the interests of all relevant parties." It seemed very unfair to you from the article, where you build up a reputation with the name "Zephoria" just to be taken by someone other than yourself. The business dealing with Trademarks really have been a mess. From what I see, this whole Trademark mess has a lot more to do people themselves than Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter. Christine Harold would agree with me. From her article, "Ourspace Intro," she stated that "'on MySpace there is no distinction between personal and mass media. A teenager can post a photo from last night's party, a poem for a lost boyfriend, buttons that play her favorite song and a clip from her favorite TV show.'... The rise of social networking upends the equation again. Users of Facebook choose to reveal—even to flaunt—aspects of their private lives, to at least some part of the public world." From this, I am more convinced that people themselves did this to themselves. Although we can blame ourselves, the Social Networks we've chosen to use holds so sort of responsibility concerning our Trademarks.

Michael Liang

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