Mr. Frager,
Actually, it is infringement and it’s a common misconception among bloggers. Even with attribution posting a substantial portion of an article, especially one from a subscription service, is most definitely copyright infringement.

Fair use revolves around the concept of depriving the copyright owner of income. By posting a substantial portion of the article it diminishes the likelihood that someone will purchase either a subscription or a reprint.

This is common knowledge in the publishing and advertising industries. If you happen to know someone employed in either of those businesses, they can give you more detail on how it works.

There comes a point when its easier to start over – this my friends has reached this point – NO ONE will ever win here.

With that said – thank you for the amusement and confusion

You have too good a grasp of the law to expect original thinking for free- that’s the billable side of my life… not what I offer for free.

What I did was quote from an article in AdAdge with proper attribution to support both branding and media experts agreeing that the name change was silly and unnecessary.

Studies show that most people don’t trust links in comment sections, nor do they have the time or patience to register their email address at a linked site and wade through an entire article (and the other articles linked within) to find the salient points. So if you want to call it copyright infringement, so be it. Drudge Report, Twitter, Digg, Technorati and Apple Investors News call it a business plan.

In all too many years of business you will never find a single suit against me for anything. Not even one WIPO. But you will find mounds of letters and emails thanking me for the coverage, mentions and traffic… and this includes AdAge, NY Times and Business Week, so I keep doing what I do.

btw, How is our friend yy?

I was wrong to think you could possibly listen to sound reasoning.

Umm, I listened to everything you had to say, and unlike you, was able to refute you point-by-point. And not just with “diatribes,” but with literature to back up exactly what I was saying, despite your claims that I was wrong.

You have repeatedly told me to “keep quiet” and that I was wrong, yet, you have not shown a single scrap of anything to back up your claims. I have quoted sections of the Lanham Act to you, and even pulled up a White Paper from Harvard Law.

Hell, I could probably get a lawyer and a judge in here that specialize in trademark law to back me up, and you would continue with this crap as if I never did it.

So let me see … I have presented a tremendous amount of literature to back up my statements. You have presented nothing.

Who is presenting “sound reasoning” again?

I love a good debate. I’m taking the time to debate this because it really fires me up.

Why do I like a good debate? Not because I like to be right, but because I like to LEARN SOMETHING. If I had gone all these years believing that my take on trademark law was right, and you challenged me, and I either read the proof you provided, or looked it up on my own (I did the latter), then I would be grateful to have learned something from you, and even conceded I was wrong.

But I have presented direct evidence that I am right. And instead of showing me additional evidence compiled by you to refute my claims, you just sit back and try to stab annoyingly at me with a stick.

That’s rather boring, and way too easy. I prefer to have actual challenge in my debates.

I did not even begin to scratch the surface on your failed logic.

Please, at LEAST scratch the surface. Show us some evidence, like I did with the White Paper and the actual Lanham Act — the backbone of federal trademark law — that shows me how my logic is failed. You keep saying it’s failed, and keep saying I’m wrong .. but it takes more than repeating yourself to make what you say true.

Instead you go off on tangents of misguided “legal” advice and Wiki references in pointlessly long diatribes.

I used a single Wiki reference, and later used a very detailed White Paper from Harvard Law. I don’t think any of my discussion, which effectively refuted what you had to say, as pointless. What’s actually pointless is your whining about losing this argument.

Either give us some proof to back up your statements, or admit you’re wrong, or bow out gracefully. But if you’re just going to cry about this, I am all out of tissues.

I WANT to be proven wrong, because only when I’m proven wrong will I learn anything. And I’m ALWAYS the first to admit when I’m wrong, and I smile about it, because I WANT TO LEARN SOMETHING.

All I am learning here is that even with a stack of evidence against you, you’re still not convinced you are wrong. I feel bad for any prosecutor that ends up with you on a jury.

Didn’t this whole mess for you start because you failed to properly negotiate and only realized that after the fact? Again you jump in here without any thoughtful consideration.

Nope. It had nothing to do with negotiation. You are so lost in your own world of how all this works that you forgot the real reason why all of this was being talked about.

So let me spell it out, and connect the dots:

1. NBCU purchased the “SyFy” mark from me, as well as potentially confusing (and sometimes already used) alternatives, “Sy” and “SFY.”

2. NBCU used that newly acquired name to rebrand a network.

3. Initial coverage in March talked extensively about how I created the name. Many times I was asked if I was upset about how the deal was negotiated, and while I acknowledged that I could’ve received more if I knew who they were, I also stated that getting credited with creating a word that is now gracing a major television cable channel, was a perfect trade for me.

4. NBCU does interviews leading to the actual launch of Syfy, and two publications either imply or are explicit about Michael Engleman coining the term, while leaving out the truth of the actual origin of the name.

5. I try to reach out to NBCU to get this resolved quietly, but get no response. I keep trying, and eventually write a column about it, which was quoted here (although originally in poor context, which created even MORE confusion). In my column where I am EXPLICITLY stating that I simply want to be given the proper credit for the creation of a mark that is due to me, I make it clear that I shouldn’t just shut up about it because they gave me a lot of money, because in actuality, they gave me just $250,000, when an actual fair deal if all sides were properly identified in the discussion would’ve likely been closer to $2.5 million. I, of course, make it clear that this is all hindsight discussion, but use that point to emphasize that I shouldn’t just take a bunch of money and shut up about it, that because NBCU paid what they did, I had every right in the world to demand that I be given proper credit for the creation of the word in the form and context that it was not being used in.

Everything else that has been brought up has been superfluous. That is the whole story right there.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have much more interesting things to do than to keep beating this long-dead horse.

I was wrong to think you could possibly listen to sound reasoning. I did not even begin to scratch the surface on your failed logic. Instead you go off on tangents of misguided “legal” advice and Wiki references in pointlessly long diatribes. Didn’t this whole mess for you start because you failed to properly negotiate and only realized that after the fact? Again you jump in here without any thoughtful consideration.

mr. frager,

You don’t accept criticism period. There is no personal attack here except your references to how strong my balls may or may not be. What you did in this thread was clearly “copyright infringement”. Maybe you and mr. hinman can trade notes over some coffee about your seemingly endless “knowledge” of trademarks and copyrights.

I will take that as an admission that you were wrong.

Thanks!