More idiotic goonery in the service of branding. Palm sent nastygrams to operators of sites whose domains included "palm," telling them to switch the phrase to "palmos." I mean, who give's a rat's ass whether the fan sites that are devoted to promoting your products are called "PalmFoo" or "PalmOSFoo?" The jackass lawyers at Palm, Inc. offered a bone in the form of a license that allowed fan-sites free use of "Palm OS" (which is covered under the doctrine of Fair Use anyway, thanks a million) while making threatening noises about insisting "that you work with us to re-brand your Web site in a manner that does not infringe Palm's trademark rights," and giving the sites' owners two weeks to comply. In retaliation — or out of fear of future ham-fisted bullying — many of these sites switched their names to "PocketWhatever," opting to promote Microsoft's PocketPC platform. Nice job, Palm. You've just set back your branding effort by years.
To my mind, corporate counsel is problematic because it's a non-bankable resource. Either your lawyers are harassing your customers or they're sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. Either way, they're drawing a salary, and that means that at corporate year-end, they need to account for their draw on the bottom line. So coopering up a bunch of nastygrams makes a handy justification: "This year, Legal cost the company $1.2 million in salaries and overheads, and successfully defended 187 attacks on the corporate brand and IP, valued at $1 billion, which means that we saved the company $187 billion – $1.2 million. Hell, we're revenue-positive!"
I'm convinced that if there were some means to time-share in-house counsel, paying an hourly only for the genuinely useful stuff — real threats to IP, contract negotiations, etc — that we'd see a lot less of this idiocy.
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