451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
SocialMail vs. SocialMail
Raven Zachary, December 12, 2006 @ 11:36 am ETI received an email yesterday from Alexander Muse, the CEO of Spur, concerning a potential problem arising from his open source release of the Big in Japan social media tools. All of the Big in Japan social media tools were released under the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) in November. One of these tools is called SocialMail, which allows email to be sent as RSS.
It seems that a new startup company, SocialMail, is not happy with the naming confusion. Although this type of conflict isn’t specific to open source licensing, it does raise some interesting questions concerning open source project brand protection. In this case, Alex is pursuing trademark protection. If you search the USPTO trademark database for “socialmail” (search link), you will see that Alex submitted his request for the name four days before SocialMail, the startup company, a move that should help to defend the SocialMail open source project brand.
For more information on this topic, please take a look at Alex’s blog post – “Open source invalidates trademark?“.
Comments (5) Categories: Licensing,Software
Thanks for bringing light to this matter. We were surprised that instead of admitting a mistake and pulling down the site, Ankesh Kumar and Rajiv Dutta decided to argue that we no longer had a claim to the name since we had released the source code of SocialMail. Shortly after our conference call (on the same day no less), Ankesh registered the SocialMail mark with the USPTO. We feel that action proves Ankesh and his team were acting in bad faith when they suggested they didn’t realize we had been operating under the SocialMail brand a year before he launched this November. Anyway, the saga continues and they still have not removed the site. Again, thanks for the note.
Facts:
Monday 12/4 I spoke to Alex who expressed his concern. We said although we felt their was no conflict, RSS to email feeder, vs. a web collaboration app, we would consider changing the name.
The following came to our attention the next day from their website:
” This morning while I was driving to work I was considering how much time we should invest in the free feed tools we built over the past year including FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail. They need a lot of work to be relevant, but we are super busy working with our paying social media clients. Do we have the time to support a suite of tools that were very hot a year ago, but cooling off by the day?”
We questioned is this a business they were continuing with. We are still confused, but decided that the name was not that important to us. Which I informed Alex of yesterday. We are moving over to http://www.grouptivity.com in the next few weeks.
That decision was made 12/11, 7 days after my initial conversation with Alex.
Alex and Ankesh – thank you both for the added information. It seems that this will soon be resolved.
The change of name has taken effect.
They never released the domain name, despite their agreement to the contrary…