It's incumbent on IKEA to police unauthorized use of their trademark somehow, but that doesn't have to mean that they must start by sending a nasty letter. When Jack Daniels thought their trademark was being infringed, they started by sending a nice letter simply asking the infringer to stop.
Another way to deal with unauthorized use of a trademark is to authorize it. So IKEA could have started with a letter asking IKEA Hackers suggesting a potential agreement and a nominal fee. An imperative cease and desist letter isn't required.
The Jack Daniels C&D letter should be a case study in public relations. While not universal, people really do respond quite well when faced with civility and respect.
They will make the "IKEA Hackers" logo look less like the official IKEA logo, and they'll put a big "not an official IKEA site" banner on each page. My guess.
That's my guess as well. That would have been the solution to go with from the start - putting in a simple disclaimer along the lines of "not affiliated with IKEA in any way". It's what I would have done if IkeaHackers was my site.
If I was an Ikea exec though, I'd additionally suggest a partnership with the site. Displaying Ikea ads and creating a funnel from individual articles to Ikea's order form would be a great idea to benefit both the site and Ikea financially. Not that Ikea needs it, but it's still good business sense.
However, we don't know what they'll come up with. It's a giant corporation so pretty much anything is possible and it's probably too early to get your hopes up.
> Displaying Ikea ads and creating a funnel from individual articles to Ikea's order form would be a great idea to benefit both the site and Ikea financially.
It is possible that IKEA does not want to be associated with a site that encourages people to use their products in ways they were not designed for. I noticed a hack to make a baby changing table by taking an IKEA dresser and attaching stuff to the top. Obviously that is something that anyone is free to do with the furniture they bought at IKEA. But... if something happened and a baby is injured and IKEA is seen as endorsing such a thing, they might be sued. I know some places are more litigious than others but companies often take some fairly hard-line "cover your ass" steps to avoid such a thing.
Not sure I would call it over-enthusiastic. If you don't protect your trademark, you lose it. It's is probably standing orders for the legal team to do that.
Given the obvious benefits TO Ikea of ikeahackers.net, it seems likely that it was an overzealous legal department move to "protect" the trademark. It's easy to forget how many people there are in a company like Ikea, and the fact that not every trademark cease-and-desist gets vetted by the people who run the company.
The thing is they should be able to protect it by simply "licensing" it to the guy who runs ikeahackers.net and charging him an "undisclosed sum" for the license (a dollar should make it legal, though IANAL).
In the original post, he said that they allowed him to use the "IKEA" name as long as he removed ads from the site. Considering the ugly banners down the side of this page -- which are for competitors of IKEA -- this seems pretty reasonable.
I know that according to the dictionary "guy" means "man" but there's no good gender-neutral word for "some person" especially if you want to be informal.
"Some guy couldn't make a right turn at the light for 10 friggin minutes so now I'm late"
Not necessarily a guy driving (let's suppose I couldn't see the driver; I just know their car didn't move for forever) and it's unfair/sexist to men to assume it was a man, could have just as easily been a woman.
"Hey guys, is everyone ready to go to lunch?"
There might well people girls in the group that's going to lunch (there often are) and I don't want to offend them. But "Hey people, " doesn't sound right, "Hey folks," doesn't either, and "Hey everybody," isn't a good substitute either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8LqozaaB7s&t=1m12s
Anyone have a good gender-neutral word I can use instead?
I think "hey guys" has come to be accepted as a gender neutral term (from my experience in the UK). Somehow "That guy" however is still gender specific...
I try to default to "hey folks" or "hey all" unless it's all male "hey guys" or female "hey girls" or friends for sure "hey (words I don't normally use in public)".
I also try to stick with "person", "someone", singular they, whatever is as flexible as possible until I know what the person prefers to be called.
I do find myself accidentally defaulting to assuming he/she depending on the context. Been trying to correct myself so I don't make people feel unwelcome though. :)
Sometimes it can be regional based. For example in the south we say "ya'll" but in some other places they say "you guys" (or yooos guys).
I feel awkward saying ya'll a lot so I use you guys. But many times the group I am referring to is female so I use you girls or ladies. This can get you in trouble depending on the age of the group sometimes I get: "are you calling us young/old" and then I go back to ya'll.
> Because the person who runs the site in all probability is a male if you don't know otherwise.
I agreed with this at first glance, but on second glance: What makes you say this? If you are like me, then your antecedent probability assumption itself was based on sexism, and not evidence. And, in fact, some quick Googling suggests that at least half of bloggers are women. I suppose its debatable whether Ikeahackers is a "blog" but this seems like evidence enough to undermine the premise that, in the absence of any other information, the person behind the site is probably a man.
I don't mean to condemn you, or anything like that. I freely admit that I use the word "guy" by default and, as I mentioned, I was initially in agreement with your point until I took a step back and did a little intentional self-criticism.
I hope we can all agree that sexism is probably universal, to one degree or other, and that we all should work to minimize it, but also that the occasional slip does not make one a bad person.
>I agreed with this at first glance, but on second glance: What makes you say this? If you are like me, then your antecedent probability assumption itself was based on sexism, and not evidence. And, in fact, some quick Googling suggests that at least half of bloggers are women.
You wrongly assume that the probability assessment was done solely on the fact that it's a blog. It's not. There are additional information that influences the probability. Mainly that there's hacking involved.
I think we're all still waiting to see the evidence -- as opposed to biases -- upon which you're basing these antecedent probabilities.
There's also another point worth making: even if it were true that you have a truly objective, rational reason for assuming that (e.g.) the author of the blog is a man, this doesn't resolve the question of whether you should speak as though you assume all unidentified hackers, bloggers, whatever are men. There is more at stake than whether you happen to be right or wrong in guessing the blogger's gender. The problem is that such patterns of language can and do easily harden into norms -- i.e., you may only use masculine nouns for probabilistic reasons, but this pattern of speaking, if sufficiently widespread, can give rise to the view it is abnormal (in the normative, not the merely descriptive sense) for women to hack or start hacker blogs. This is a bad thing because the social pressure that results can meaningfully restrict the freedom of future women.
If you mean defaulting to that word, it's because it's the best generic stand-in.
If you mean defaulting to assuming someone's male, it's because it's deeply ingrained in culture. Notice how female characters in cartoons often must be explicitly differentiated as such (pink ribbons, bows, clothes)?
I would get yelled at by my wife if I said "girl" and meant anyone over about 15.
As such, given I didn't know the gender (or age) of the person involved, I tend to default to "guy" as gender-neutral. As mentioned by another post, "you guys" can include both genders.
It might be a bit tangential I guess but did guy always mean male person? My mum and quite a few people from her generation seem to often use it to mean both men and women. This is in the UK though.
The etymology of "guy" is worth looking up. Apparently derived from Guy Fawkes, who was burnt in effigy. And said effigies became a synonym for "grotesque person" which in turn became just "person". In view of that, male or female shouldn't really matter and, yes, I've heard it used for both genders. (Quite often in the "you guys" form, which is yet another way to compensate for a lack of appropriate grammar in English).
This is perhaps a bit overzealous, but for those who aren't aware, IKEA does have a dubiously legal corporate structure:
http://www.economist.com/node/6919139
From what I've heard, if they didn't, someone else might have a case that their trademark is open to use.