Cory Doctorow posts his thoughts about O’Reilly Press and Web 2.0:

Trademarks are intended to protect consumers by ensuring that goods and services aren’t misleadingly labeled. A trademark holder, say, “Coke,” gets the right to sue companies that use the word “Coke” in their products and services in a way that would lead the public to believe that Coke was behind them.

But trademarks aren’t “property” — they aren’t words owned by companies. They’re the ability to use the courts to protect a company’s customers. That’s a pretty good idea: the public deserves to be protected from misleading marketing.

The question is whether using “Web 2.0″ in a conference name is misleading: will the average person who hears about a Web 2.0 event assume that it must be put on by O’Reilly, or will she assume that it’s just an event about the Web 2.0 technology and business-practices that O’Reilly defined?

O’Reilly has an amazing, wonderful gift for popularizing hard ideas and for explaining abstruse technology in catchy ways. “Web 2.0″ is only one of O’Reilly’s many accomplishments, which started with the publication of the first user documentation for Unix, and has continued through many iterations of excellent, world-changing ideas and memes.

The downside of creating amazing, industry-shaking ideas is that they become embedded in the popular consciousness. While the digerati know that O’Reilly originated Web 2.0, the idea is so infectious that it’s just become part of the fabric of the industry. One of the things that makes O’Reilly’s ideas so great is that they go on to be part of the infrastructure, invisible and huge and powerful.

But that means that O’Reilly’s ideas are also not uniquely associated with O’Reilly.
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I like O’Reilly Press books — I like them a lot. When learning a new technical discipline, one of the first things I do is buy whatever O’Reilly has published on the subject. And when I’m asked what books I recommend on programming, web design, and so on, I always reply: In a Nutshell? O’Reilly Press.