Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

zephoria.org

133 pointspetercooper93 comments

It's sad to me that companies get priority for names, even when people have had the names for years before the company existed.

If she really was using their name improperly, Tumblr would have been within their rights... But they STILL should have contacted her first and let her try to explain. Yanking it out from under her and selling it to someone else is just rude at best, and criminal at worst. (I'm assuming they sold it... If they didn't, they're dumber than I think. This kind of BS isn't worth it unless they get something from it.)

I've been mired in the vagaries of trademark law for a few weeks now, and based on my limited knowledge, there is no legal reason that a company with the trademark Zephoria would be able to prevent her from also using that name, if she were able to show that she had used it since 1998.

Part of obtaining a trademark is doing due diligence and finding out how the name is being used in public. That includes use that isn't trademarked, but is publicly visible.

This is a different matter, since it's about a username on a private service, but the principle still holds. Danah has no legal recourse in this instance, but it does show that Tumblr is acting hastily and, in my view, improperly, by just yanking her account away from her without notice, appeal, or recourse.

Username and public URL. That's probably why Zephoria went after it so aggressively.

Also, isn't trademark restricted to an "area"? I would think it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities for two companies to want the same username with trademark claims to back both.

Yes, but then it'd be a deliberation between two holders rather than one holder and a non-holder.

I'm surprised there aren't many famous 'double' trademarks. The only one that springs to mind is Jif, the lemon juice, and Jif, the kitchen cleaner which were both household names in the UK. The kitchen cleaner renamed to Cif as part of a global brand realignment, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Good call, sir! I'm expecting a torrent of replies now with obvious examples I'd forgotten about(!) :-)

Two quick examples of double trademarks:

Apple Records (Beatles) and Apple (Steve Jobs). They started with an agreement to stay clear of the others turf, but then Apple Computing got into music. I think they went to court before working something out.

WWF (World Wrestling Federation vs World Wildlife Fund). They went to court and the wrestling became WWE.

Apple was already mentioned. Tyco and ITT both come to mind as well, although I think the toy company and the for-profit college have licensing agreements with the respective industrial conglomerates.

Hershey Ice Cream and Hershey Chocolate as well.

it is potentially criminal if they sold it but they are stupid if they didn't? did i read that wrong?

Nope, you read that correctly.

To do something that slimy and not get paid for it is stupid. (The fact that it was stupid in the first place does affect the fact that not getting paid for it is stupid in itself.)

> If she really was using their name improperly, Tumblr would have been within their rights.

I agree. But she wasn't trying to pass herself off as anyone else, merely use the handle she's been using for over a decade.

> Yanking it out from under her and selling it to someone else is just rude at best, and criminal at worst.

I don't see how it's criminal, though I agree it's rude. I run the MeowCat messaging website (http://meowc.at/ -- it's a cross between Twitter and blogging) and I certainly wouldn't allow a company to take over a user's identity like Tumblr have done.

So if you're reading this Danah, if you want to create Zephoria on MeowCat, I promise I won't give your account to someone else.

> I certainly wouldn't allow a company to take over a user's identity like Tumblr have done

Not even for $1000? $5,000? $10,000? We don't know if a favour was done or paid, if any.

Actually I hadn't considered that use-case.

Nice idea of "promise" you have. First you toot your horn without adding any value to the conversation, and then even THAT turns out to be empty words?

> First you toot your horn without adding any value to the conversation

And what value have YOU added to the conversation?

> THAT turns out to be empty words?

This will only be the case if at some time I renege on this promise, which I don't intend to do.

Was she paying for tumblr service, or was it free? If it as free, there's not much recourse....

Seems pretty dumb for a "social media consulting company" to get on the bad side of a social media poster child.

I'm really surprised they've managed to beat her in google ranking.

Why? They're a social media consultancy. They must be familiar with SEO.

because she really has content and they are relative nobodies. maybe i'm just not cynical enough when it comes to the effectiveness of SEO.

Not when I search for 'Zephoria'.

.org (her site) has the first 6 spots; .com (them) has the next 4; and then it's her twitter and flickr accounts.

Another reminder that we should all just get our own domains.

Using a subdomain of another company is always risky and it's bad branding.

In fact, Tumblr lets you use your own domain. She could use tumblr.zephoria.org and Zephoria Inc. could use tumblr.zephoria.com. Everyone wins!

Um, no. These people were disappeared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rettig_Report

Apparently her blog was only moved. Inconvenient, yes. Gross human rights violation, no. See also: comparing yourself to Rosa Parks.

I don't see any reason to fret over a word, it was never compared to human rights violation in the post and in the context they did disappear her from her chosen handle on the site which is just as much as removing her blog as it isn't linked to the other in any other way.

Additionally, the post title 'Tumblr disappears [someone]' pretty much implies they're not being sent to the gulag or gitmo, it's just a figure of speech.

People sent to the gulag were, as far as I know, never disappeared. They were arrested, subjected to a trial, and sentenced. Transitive "disappear" entered modern English from Spanish used to describe the actions of the US's allies against their citizens during the Cold War.

"Disappear" (transitive) is absolutely a reference to a human-rights violation. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disappear:

disappear (ˌdɪsəˈpɪə)

— vb

1. ( intr ) to cease to be visible; vanish

2. ( intr ) to go away or become lost, esp secretly or without explanation

3. ( intr ) to cease to exist, have effect, or be known; become extinct or lost: the pain has disappeared

4. ( tr ) (esp in South and Central America) to arrest secretly and presumably imprison or kill (a member of an opposing political group)

In the fourth of four variants, where all three of the earlier ones seem to apply well here. Language is language. Causes and issues, no matter how grave, don't get to own bits of it.

None of the first three apply here. They are all clearly marked as intransitive ("The train disappeared into the night") rather than transitive ("Tumblr disappeared her").

The first three are intransitive senses; I'm sorry the abbreviation "intr" wasn't familiar to you, but it's quite common in dictionaries. Please delete your unnecessarily aggressive comment, ajross.

It's an inflammatory word whose use is designed to associate with despicable and unpleasant deeds. It's in bad taste to dilute the meaning of the word for personal vanity.

It's a perfectly valid usage that does not at all necessarily imply political assassinations or other despicable. No reasonable person would interpret her post's title as claiming any kind of equivalence with political assassination, and any suspicion of that wouldn't survive a cursory reading of the actual post.

Also, Ms. Boyd holds a PhD from the Berkeley School of Information and is a well known & respected Microsoft researcher in social networking & media and online identity. The professional interest in not having broken links to her writings alone is sufficient to remove this matter from the realm of "personal vanity," nevermind the more substantive yet slippery matters of identity.

Absolutely agreed. What Tumblr did was rotten, but we live in an age where people are genuinely disappeared on a daily basis, and we've even had posts to HN regarding missing persons. It's very misleading to use the word to mean something different given the amount of proper usage it receives.

Yeah, but, if you're a very important social media researcher who has important information to disseminate to your followers in order to justify your own very importance, then anything short of

"Tumblr disappeared me…"

isn't going to generate the same outrage, and publicity, that Xeni Jardin did when she tried to erase Violet Blue's posts from BoingBoing. "Erase posts" being the conventional and operating phrase. So don't blame her; it's the social media-generated apathy.

No, I will blame her. Of course lying and exaggerating will generate more outrage, that's exactly what I meant by my claim of "linkbait". She could have generated more outrage by saying that Tumblr raped her, but I do not believe the ends (generating outrage) justify the means (being misleading).

I was being sarcastic if reference for not blaming her. For a person who markets themselves as a preeminent scholar on all things social, it seems odd that the only times I hear about her is when she's over-dramatizing some issue related to her personal interests or herself.

Again, this person has never created anything, held down a job that required results or contributed anything aside from opinion and self-centered promotion to any discourse. She reads about what others do in order to pass judgement and when people, or in this case Tumblr, doesn't take her seriously, she whines. I expect more reports of violations from this source in the future.

Um, no. 'Disappear' as a transitive verb predates all of that by many decades. E.g.: 1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 "We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron."