It's the real thing

Nice article. It reminds me of a fight I had with Sun Computer (i.e. Sun Microsystems) some years ago, after I created a Web page that computed the sun&#x27;s position &#x2F; sunrise &#x2F; sunset times for a given location (<a href="http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arachnoid.com&#x2F;lutusp&#x2F;sunrise</a>). Without thinking very deeply, I named my page &quot;Sun Computer&quot;.<p>Pretty soon, and without any nefarious intent on my part, my &quot;Sun Computer&quot; Web page ascended above the official &quot;Sun Computer&quot; corporate website in the search engine listings.<p>Shortly thereafter I received a registered letter from a team of corporate lawyers who threatened to sue me for disregarding Sun&#x27;s proprietary ownership of the word &quot;Sun&quot;. My explanation that there is an astronomical body with that same name, and that my page provided information about said astronomical entity, fell on deaf ears.<p>For some reason, the corporate lawyers couldn&#x27;t bring themselves to simply say that my Web page was above theirs in the search rankings and I needed to do something about it. Instead, the correspondence was phrased entirely in threatening legalese, in terms of proprietary trademarks and public deceit. I finally figured out what the problem was, and renamed my page &quot;Solar Computer&quot;. Problem solved.

Offtopic: I loathe it when people project agreement on their &quot;opponent&quot; like this: &quot;We believe you will agree [you shouldn&#x27;t use our slogan]&quot;. If he agreed, he wouldn&#x27;t have used that statement in the first place.<p>I&#x27;ve had it a few times where people who disagreed with something I wrote or did start their statement with &quot;Surely you understand that [you shouldn&#x27;t do what you did]&quot;. No, surely I don&#x27;t, that&#x27;s the reason we have this disagreement in the first place.

I wonder if this would have been as effective today. In 1970 this communication was delivered and responded to via regular mail. So this correspondence likely took a week or more for the round trip, which doesn&#x27;t require, but does I think encourage a more deliberate thoughtful approach to these kind of discussions.<p>Today this communication might be delivered via email or some other near instantaneous form of communication which I think it more likely to lead to escalation. It&#x27;s so easy to respond without thoroughly considering your response. While it certainly isn&#x27;t prudent to act emotionally with legal matters, that certainly doesn&#x27;t mean that people don&#x27;t do it.<p>I guess I just think it&#x27;s interesting how technology has in some ways gotten ahead of people in terms of having healthy social interactions with other people.

I may be wrong, but legally Coca-Cola had to protect the slogan, otherwise they would lose the copyright, no? The &quot;our advertising will help you&quot; defense doesn&#x27;t hold up in court.<p>Can any lawyers confirm?

Perhaps because of how they replied to Coca Cola is why the company did not pursue it further? There is a lot to say about politeness between responsible organizations. Not all big companies are staffed by hordes of idiots.

Students in AP English in the US get to analyze rhetoric like this. I remember this as one of my favorite passages.