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FC: Pillsbury sends lawyer nastygrams to geeks using term "bake-off"
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 10:29:05 -0500
********** From: "Ron Acher" <ron () pulver com> To: "Declan McCullough" <declan () well com> Subject: Pillsbury and Bake-Offs Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:59:25 -0500 Hi Declan: Rich Shockey suggested I contact you re the following item which may be of interest to your readers. Jeff Pulver, CEO of Pulver.com, is taking a position regarding recent cease and desist actions by the Pillsbury Company concerning the term "Bake-Off." In tomorrow's issue of the Pulver Report, his monthly e-mail to nearly 70,000 insiders in the IP Communications community, he says: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pillsbury Bakes-Off against the SIP Developer Community The Pillsbury Company, owners of the "Doughboy" and other trademarks, has taken aim at the worldwide computer and telecom technology development communities by sending cease and desist letters to the hosts and sponsors of technology industry standards "bake-off" contests, including those involved with the recent 6th SIP Bake-off. Pillsbury has a longstanding trademark on the term "bake-off," and claims that the generally accepted use of this term in our industries is confusing and interferes with their branding! A little history. In 1949, Pillsbury staged the first national cooking competition at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Planned as a one-time event, the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest became so popular that it has become an American institution -- and the term "bake-off" has gone into general usage throughout the world. For example, the European Telecommunications Association cites Webster's Dictionary's definition of a "bake-off" as a "baking contest, especially among amateur cooks, in which entries must be prepared and baked within a stipulated time," without any reference to the Pillsbury trademark. It also explains that in the engineering world, the term refers to events where engineers get together to test their implementations of new standards one against the other. These events are part of the standards development process and an important means of enhancing the quality of the final deliverable. According to Henning Schulzrinne, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University (one of the institutions which has received a cease and desist letter from Pillsbury), who has been helping to organize the Session Initiation Protocol interoperability testing events in our industry under the name SIP Bake-Off, the first known use of the term in the now common engineering sense was in 1979, referred to in a 1987 Web posting on the TCP & IP Bake-Off regarding RFC 1025. Even a casual search on the Google search engine produces about 44,100 hits on the term "bake-off." While many of these refer to Pillsbury, a very large number do not, supporting the notion that this term has become associated with a wide variety of food-related and non-food-related competitive activities. While I can appreciate that Pillsbury might object to some of the food-related ones, I do not think that Pillsbury's aggressively legal approach to the developer community is good for Pillsbury or for the companies participating in technology bake-offs. Our friends have no interest in spending large sums of money on lawyers to dispute Pillsbury. In fact, I think Pillsbury should be pleased that the term has become so much of an American institution that it has gone into general usage, and that far from diluting the fame of the Pillsbury event associated with the term, it enhances it by bringing it to a wider audience. I believe Pillsbury's business interests would be better served by aligning itself with the professional institutions such as Columbia University and ETSI who organize bakeoffs, to foster further positive associations of Pillsbury with the term. Why should Pillsbury unnecessarily create a situation in which people come to a negative view of their company, or worse still from any company's perspective, to come to think of them as petty, trivial, bullying, overbearing, or even ridiculous? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please feel free to use this. Sincerely, -- Ron Acher ron () pulver com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- FC: Pillsbury sends lawyer nastygrams to geeks using term "bake-off" Declan McCullagh (Jan 22)