[ this message was also sent to the Ringlink-open mailing list and the
World of Webrings mailing list ]
Dear Lincoln,
In October last year you called my attention to the service mark you had
been granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. You "offered" to
license the use of the term "webring" to me, or else you suggested that
I remove the term from my site.
You seem to be concerned about the use of the term webring in connection
with Ringlink and other programs/services for running webrings. Let me
state:
1. The term "webring" - as opposed to e.g. WebRing.org or WebRing.com -
was used in a generic sense long before your registered date of first
use 2001-10-16. Examples:
- That's how I used the term when I announced the first version of
Ringlink at 2000-07-31: http://arc.ringlink.org/ringlink-open/msg00000.html
- A large number of site owners, who either run webrings or were members
of various webrings in the beginning of this century, used the term
"webring" in the generic sense. For instance, web pages where people
stated "these are the webrings I belong to:" (or something similar),
followed by both WebRing.org and RingSurf navigation panels, were
commonplace (still are).
2. Beginning some time during the 90's there has been a community of
people who like webrings and want to promote the webring concept
irrespective of which software and/or service is used to run the rings.
The community started in forums that were provided by WebRing.org. Then
there was an email list at eGroups, followed by an email list at Topica:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/ringmgr Today there is a web site, World
of Webrings http://www.webringworld.org/, where you find various generic
information about webrings including an email list:
http://www.webringworld.org/list
3. The principal topic on those mailing lists has varied. For instance,
in 2002 there was a lot of talk about WebRing.com's service on the World
of Webrings list, and the owner of Webring Inc. Tim Killeen was an
active participant in the discussion for several months.
http://www.webringworld.org/mailarc/mail24.html
Through his participation he acknowledged World of Webrings, which has
all along been a place to discuss webrings in general.
4. Wikipedia's webring page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring starts
with a decent generic description of what a webring is. Even if the
history section of that page is rather biased (written by someone at
Webring Inc.?), the page as a whole demonstrates that "webring" is a
generic term.
5. The service mark you were granted refers to services that provide
search engines. It should be noted that Ringlink is a program for
running webrings, not a search engine.
I'm of the firm opinion that you should never have been granted the
"webring" service mark. I find your claim, that I should stop using a
term that I have been using all since Ringlink was introduced - and even
before that - to be simply unreasonable.
Yours sincerely,
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
Goteborg, Sweden