The problem here is that "his" name is also a common verb in the English language that means "to raise something for discussion".

I'm not sure he should get to prevent any discussion forum software from using that word, or the clever dns hack moot.it to advertise said software that lets you "discuss it", because he happened to choose a common-ish verb as a screen name, years ago.

"common" is a stretch -- maybe it's common as a regional dialect. Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)

Keep in mind that UPS has successfully trademarked a color, as have many other companies; "Apple" is a trademark, "Time" is a trademark, "Shell" is a trademark, "Caterpillar" is a trademark ... and odds are, as you read each of those common words, you knew exactly which company holds the trademark.

Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.

>"common" is a stretch -- maybe it's common as a regional dialect.

Some googling and brief dives into etymological references are suggesting to me that the original usage is more common in Canada and the UK than the US.

> Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)

Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.

> Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.

I don't disagree. But note that it's Chris Poole's lawyer who's claiming that Moot can't be used as a trademark on the basis that Chris Poole and his screen name are so famous that they're entitled to Right of Publicity protection under New York law, which strikes me as stretching that law rather past its original intent (is Rand Corporation violating Paul Rand's Right of Publicity? Does Richard Gere have a case against Top Gear?).

> Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.

4Chan has 22 million uniques per month and a million posts per day [1], and seems to be referenced regularly on all of the other "big" online forum sites. And, when Time gave in and acknowledged the poll results for Christopher Poole as their most influential person of the year, they referred to him first as "moot" and the stunt picked up coverage in mainstream publications like the LA Times [2].

So, I think you may be underestimating 4Chan's influence. But, I'll concede that I may be overestimating it as well.

[1]: http://www.4chan.org/advertise [2]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/04/4chan-tim...

> "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions

That's completely wrong. The majority of the world doesn't know who Moot is. The majority doesn't even know what 4chan is, even if they do start most of the internet memes.

If I asked my mom what "moot" meant, she'd probably tell me something like "something that's no longer relevant or worth arguing about". Using HN comments as a confirmation tool is equally ridiculous. We are not the right community to use when determining the legal usage of a phrase.

While each of the common names your have listed are trademarks, they are trademarks within their respective fields. It would be completely appropriate for me to start a watch shop and call it "Time" (assuming there isn't already a national or state trademark of watch shops called "Time").

Moot is an online persona, not a product. I'm not familiar with New York state law on "public rights of publicity", but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have exclusive rights to the word "Moot".

This would be like Tom from MySpace suing Tom's shoes or TomTom. (Okay, not quite because the company is working on forum software which is close to 4chan, but it's not far off).

You seem to be a pretty smart individual. How could I have made it more clear that I was talking about "moot" in the context of online discussions when I wrote, "in the context of online discussions," which you quoted? Serious question. I seem to be having trouble getting even longtime HN readers to respond to what I actually wrote, instead of what they imagine I wrote. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Unless you're prepared to argue that the majority of the world uses online discussions or talks about online discussion systems, or that a conversation with your mom is a suitable anecdote when talking about online discussions, I think you should reconsider just how "completely wrong" my argument was.

Because, you're right, the examples I cited are trademarks within their respective fields, and that was the entire point of my comment.

I apologize for not making that more clear.

I think that the part that I have issue with is that people have been having online discussions for far longer than moot has been around (hell, probably even alive). Unless you are aware of 4chan, you'd probably never even heard of him outside of a few news articles. 4chan and moot are well known within their own realms, but in reality, it is a small fraction of the "online discussion" world. So, when you're looking at applying trademark-level protection, it's not appropriate to look at the smaller realm, but rather the environment as a whole.

This all seems like a big-fish, small-pond vs. small-fish, medium-pond argument to me.

Moot maybe incredibly influential in his corner of the 'net, but the larger world probably doesn't know him. Moreover, the brand of his product isn't "moot", it's 4chan. To top it off, "moot" isn't a rare word, it's a commonly used word in English. All of this combines to make it very difficult for him to try to make any direct claims against Moot.it.

The difference may be that Apple is not selling fruit, Shell crustaceans, nor Caterpillar butterflies; so their trademarks are presumably easier to justify.

To suggest that a person owns a dictionary definition of a word that predates their existence by ~800 years[1] smacks of hubris

[1] OED

> The problem here is that "his" name is also a common verb in the English language that means "to raise something for discussion"

Common? Please can you point to any online usage of the word in that way?

I know lots of people use it to mean "no longer relevant".

> 2. N. Amer. (orig. Law). Of a case, issue, etc.: having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic. Now the usual sense in North America.

Maybe I just spend too much time around lawyer types, or maybe its usage in the original meaning is simply more common in Canada than the US (which, given the amount of UKisms we've retained, isn't unlikely), but I hear it used that way on a fairly regular basis.

"meaningless/irrelevant" is the adjectival form of moot, not the verb, and it's worth reinforcing that this is a usage shift specific to North America. To "moot it" doesn't mean "to make it irrelevant"; rather, things originally became "moot" when they were topics you could argue over but which had no further relevance in the law, and the latter grew to dominate its usage in the adjectival form in North America. But that usage didn't migrate back to the verb, or appear at all abroad.

Here's a usage in verbal noun form to mean "a meeting for discussion": http://www.themagicboxstore.com/paganmoot.htm

And there are, of course, the well known "moot courts", so named not because they're "unpractical/irrelevant/meaningless" court but instead because they're forums for the students to debate the law.