Re: New acronym/term...

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• Previous message: Terry Gray: "Re: IMAP vs. multipart/signed"
• Maybe in reply to: Brad Knowles: "New acronym/term..."

While I'm all in favor of finding a good acronym, I'd like to point out a
few things about this mini-thread:

- You are confusing copyrights and trademarks. Copyrighting your message on
this thread does nothing to legally protect your ideas for acroynms, only
the way that you said them. Further, by stating your naming ideas in
public, you may have damaged your chance of trademarking them.

- It is premature to assume that IMC would want to own and control such
trademarks. Our Operations Council *might* want to do this, but it hasn't
even been proposed to them. Given that Dave and I are the currently
designated administrators here, I will say that administrating a trademark
is non-trivial and I would want to look into it much more before I
determine how much time and legal power it takes.

IMHO, the best way to go about this is for IMC to choose a name that isn't
in common use today and to start to use it in a consistent way. We might
trademark it, we might not. Either way, if IMC says many times "<acronym
here> means mail that conforms to this document", and our publicity machine
works reasonably well, we can embarass anyone who is pretending to be
<acronym>-compliant and scare them away (or, better yet, cause them to
become <acronym>-compliant!).

--Paul Hoffman
--Internet Mail Consortium

• Previous message: Terry Gray: "Re: IMAP vs. multipart/signed"
• Maybe in reply to: Brad Knowles: "New acronym/term..."