WOW Gunner! Someone is going to be mightily busy :-) My
ringsurf page also calls it a Webring and has since 1998.
So sorry you are being plagued by this issue again :-(
Lyn
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gunnar Hjalmarsson" <author@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lincoln Zeve" <lzeve@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <list@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 10:28 AM
Subject: [RLopen] Use of the term "webring"
[ 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