<story><title>It&apos;s the real thing</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/07/its-real-thing.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lutusp</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s position &amp;#x2F; sunrise &amp;#x2F; sunset times for a given location (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arachnoid.com&amp;#x2F;lutusp&amp;#x2F;sunrise&lt;/a&gt;). Without thinking very deeply, I named my page &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Pretty soon, and without any nefarious intent on my part, my &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot; Web page ascended  above the official &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot; corporate website in the search engine listings.&lt;p&gt;Shortly thereafter I received a registered letter from a team of corporate lawyers who threatened to sue me for disregarding Sun&amp;#x27;s proprietary ownership of the word &amp;quot;Sun&amp;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.&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the corporate lawyers couldn&amp;#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 &amp;quot;Solar Computer&amp;quot;. Problem solved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmdeller</author><text>Presumably you are referring to the former Sun Microsystems. The amusing thing to me about this story is that it&amp;#x27;s such a convoluted name that their own potential customers apparently can&amp;#x27;t remember it. And so, attempting to locate the computer company, they type the closest approximation they can manage, &amp;#x27;Sun Computer&amp;#x27;, into Google, which likely didn&amp;#x27;t rank as highly as yours precisely because that verbatim phrase, being technically incorrect, is unlikely to appear directly on their own web site or in anyone else&amp;#x27;s links to their web site.&lt;p&gt;Names matter.</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s the real thing</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/07/its-real-thing.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lutusp</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s position &amp;#x2F; sunrise &amp;#x2F; sunset times for a given location (&lt;a href=&quot;http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arachnoid.com&amp;#x2F;lutusp&amp;#x2F;sunrise&lt;/a&gt;). Without thinking very deeply, I named my page &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Pretty soon, and without any nefarious intent on my part, my &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot; Web page ascended  above the official &amp;quot;Sun Computer&amp;quot; corporate website in the search engine listings.&lt;p&gt;Shortly thereafter I received a registered letter from a team of corporate lawyers who threatened to sue me for disregarding Sun&amp;#x27;s proprietary ownership of the word &amp;quot;Sun&amp;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.&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the corporate lawyers couldn&amp;#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 &amp;quot;Solar Computer&amp;quot;. Problem solved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shabble</author><text>They got into an utterly pointless fight with Sparkfun Electronics[1] which took some minor Streislanding by The Internet to resolve.&lt;p&gt;I suspect even in-house legal depts think in terms of billable hours...&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparkfun.com/news/300&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sparkfun.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;300&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>