S4E428 — William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace

GARY: I'm Gary. Okay. Autodesk owned the inside-of-computers dimension. Then William Gibson sued them for the deed.

MAEVE: I'm Maeve. I fund companies that stop before the deed.

OBI: Obi. Nothing Gary said would survive a loading screen.

GRUNER: Gruner. I study. Tonight, evidence has fleas.

GARY: And I'm being accurate.

OBI: You read a headline in an elevator. Autodesk applied to register one word: "Cyberspace."

MAEVE: A CAD company tried owning the future. Hard pass. Like Gary.

GARY: Thank you.

OBI: Nineteen eighty-nine. Their research lab builds virtual reality on a 386, two graphics cards, and a data glove. Six to ten frames per second.

GARY: Six frames per second. PowerPoint in ski goggles.

OBI: On that hardware, they filed for "cyberspace." Gibson, whose book coined it, objected. His lawyers sent a letter.

GARY: Then Gibson countersued by trying to trademark Eric Gullichsen!

MAEVE: No. Your brain has a demo mode.

GARY: A man! He trademarked a man!

OBI: That was the prank. Timothy Leary invented it, Barlow embellished it, Rudy Rucker amplified it, and folklore got venture-backed. The letter was real. The revenge filing never existed.

GARY: It's the better story. A founder tells that at a board meeting and closes.

OBI: You tell it and security closes around you.

GARY: That's called a pivot.

OBI: The packet separates the application from the rumor. Even imaginary property has better governance than you.

GRUNER: Few hundred polygons. Gary shipped fewer.

GARY: I'm not engaging with that.

MAEVE: Nobody is. It remains correct.

GARY: Fine. Autodesk applied. Gibson objected. Leary invented revenge. Then someone said "Autodesk is not the street," and I envy that sentence's career.

OBI: It's Gibson's. You can't have it.

GARY: Of course. Even sentences have cleaner cap tables than me.

MAEVE: cubefox: "Meanwhile, 'cyberpunk' has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre."

GARY: Somebody owns cyberpunk. Somewhere there's an office with a plaque that says CYBERPUNK and a man behind a desk deciding who gets to be sad about the future.

MAEVE: Genre exclusivity. I'd value that at eleven million, pre-revenue, and I hate that I said it.

OBI: It's a video game trademark, Gary. Not rain-slicked streets and moral decay. You cannot license ennui.

GARY: You could. There's a subscription there.

OBI: There is not a subscription there.

GRUNER: Trademarking genre like patenting sad.

GARY: I'd patent sad so fast—

MAEVE: You'd patent sad and lose to your own telemetry data.

OBI: derektank: "Choose Your Own Adventure is also trademarked."

GARY: That's a book series. You can't own the shape of a decision.

MAEVE: You can if the decision has a cover price.

OBI: throw0101a has four links on the NATO strap wars. Grown watch people, fighting over a strap. Four links, Gary. A war with footnotes.

GARY: Okay, but consider the upside. I own "cyberpunk," I send cease-and-desists to every sad novel. That's revenue. That's a business model that—

OBI: That's a man invoicing literature.

GARY: It's called licensing, Obi.

OBI: It's called being a prick with a filing cabinet.

GARY: Fuck you, my filing cabinet is beautiful. It has a lock. Nobody's ever needed the lock, but it has one.

MAEVE: A lock nobody's ever needed. I've funded that.

GRUNER: Bauxlite cabinet, I assume.

GARY: It's not Bauxlite's cabinet.

MAEVE: It's Bauxlite's cabinet.

GARY: It's— okay, it's Bauxlite's cabinet, but the lock works, which is more than the company did.

OBI: So your defense of owning a genre is that your filing cabinet outlived your aluminum company.

GARY: Yes. That's the defense. That's the whole defense.

GRUNER: Is good defense. Cabinet wins. Company is shit.

MAEVE: cubefox's point stands, though. Someone looked at an entire genre of fiction and thought: mine. Most confident thing I've heard all week, and I sit across from Gary.

GARY: Thank you.

MAEVE: It wasn't about you.

GARY: Everything's about me. I'm the cyberpunk guy now. I'm claiming it. Invoice me, sad novelists.

OBI: You cannot invoice a novel, Gary.

GARY: Watch me. Fifty dollars per rain-slicked street, twenty-five per morally ambiguous hacker, ten per neon. Neon's a rider.

OBI: You've priced the rain.

GARY: The rain is the premium tier, Obi.

GRUNER: Control group confirms: humans want to own sad.

MAEVE: He invoiced the rain. That's the data.

GARY: vessenes: "Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo."

MAEVE: A man walked a famous author through a conference and nobody tipped him. That's the industry's whole P&L.

OBI: He names the one that stuck. Facebook rebranded to "Meta."

GARY: That's just product naming. You find a powerful word, you bolt it to your thing, everyone's happy.

GRUNER: Word is not bolt. Word is stolen.

GARY: It's not stolen, it's— okay, a keyboard tick.

MAEVE: chr-s: "It's a shame we've lost 'meta' and 'grok.'"

GARY: Nobody's lost grok. Grok's a chatbot now, which is worse than lost. It's employed.

OBI: nekusar has the full list. Palantir. Anduril. Narya Capital.

MAEVE: Three companies out of one wizard fight. A diversified portfolio of Tolkien.

GRUNER: One ring, three exits. Elves did fine.

GARY: Institutions behave reasonably about this. When Halfpipe got my regulator's letter, he was very warm. "Great product, Gary. Stop."

OBI: The regulator killed your company, Gary.

GARY: Politely.

OBI: You're citing the man who shot you as a character reference.

GARY: He said "great product."

OBI: In the past tense. That's the trick of politeness, Gary — it's how institutions tell you to fuck off without paperwork.

GARY: Borrowing a word is normal. Palantir did it, Anduril did it, I would've done it—

OBI: You did do it. Halfpipe's tagline was "grind the fees." Four thousand dollars to a branding agency, and the pun was the last thing the company did.

GARY: It was a good pun—

OBI: It was a eulogy with a skateboard on it.

GARY: The difference is attribution! Facebook took Stephenson's word and never said thank you, that's rude, but it's inspiration, and inspiration is free, and—

GARY: —and free things get taken, which is basically the market, so really Meta is the—

MAEVE: Stop. You're defending a trillion-dollar company with your dead fintech. Sit in that.

GRUNER: Suka. Is beautiful collapse.

OBI: And vessenes gives the date. Stephenson coined it in 1992. Facebook took it thirty years later and thanked nobody. That's not inspiration, Gary. That's a tip nobody left.

GARY: Nineteen ninety-two. Fine. The thank-you never shipped, and my pun is still load-bearing.

OBI: Nothing you have ever built is load-bearing.

GARY: The filing cabinet is.

MAEVE: The filing cabinet is furniture, Gary.

GARY: Furniture is load-bearing if you believe in it.

OBI: You paid four thousand dollars for a pun and you're tithing to a cabinet.

GRUNER: Control group believes in cabinet. Note filed.

GARY: Thank you, Gruner.

GRUNER: Was not compliment.

MAEVE: vessenes is right, though. Nobody tips. I've sat through forty pitches and the only thanks I ever got was a term sheet.

OBI: From who?

MAEVE: Gary. It bounced.

OBI: mitxela: "The colour purple is trademarked, for chocolate."

MAEVE: That can't be—

OBI: "You can still use it for anything else. You can't make a game called Cyberpunk but you can use it for anything else."

GARY: Wait. Cadbury owns purple, but only on chocolate?

MAEVE: So no purple chocolate, but purple anything else is free.

GARY: I can paint my house Cadbury purple. Legally.

OBI: Legally, Gary. Aesthetically is a separate hearing.

GARY: This changes my whole business model. I was invoicing the rain.

MAEVE: The rain survives.

OBI: pryce has the correction. "It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined... 'Meta' is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years."

MAEVE: That's correct.

OBI: Sorry, say that again?

MAEVE: That's correct. The mark fences a category, not the language. I was wrong and the commenter was right.

GARY: Are you sick?

MAEVE: It's limited atonement, Gary. The fund does not save everyone. It saves the portfolio.

OBI: She's fine.

MAEVE: And nobody owns "meta." The Greeks had it first, and they can't even enforce.

GARY: Which is why ownership is a scam. Nobody owns anything. Words float free, companies steal whatever—

GARY: —wait. Do we own anything? Is there paperwork on me?

MAEVE: I'd file you under educational materials. Class nine. Defective.

GRUNER: Blyat. Control group has existential crisis in chocolate aisle.

OBI: jMyles says the term emerged "amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes."

GARY: That tracks. Everything good starts adjacent to a Grateful Dead tape.

OBI: Everything you started was adjacent to a Grateful Dead tape. That's the diagnosis.

OBI: And Eric_Gullichsen, the author himself, replies: Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book.

MAEVE: Nineteen ninety-four. A book jacket. The founding document of the internet's soul, and it's marketing copy.

GARY: Leary put it on the back cover next to the barcode.

MAEVE: The barcode is the part that aged well.

OBI: Uehreka, though. "This makes me wonder if omegaverse (if you don't know, don't know) is trademarked given its litigious history."

GARY: I don't know. So I don't know.

MAEVE: Correct move.

OBI: jjulius fell in. "See, this made me know. I'm gonna go shower. :("

GARY: The sad face is doing so much work.

MAEVE: He learned it in a trademark thread. That's the worst possible door.

GRUNER: Field note: humans discover sin via intellectual property.

GARY: I'm not googling it. I'm a professional.

OBI: You googled it during the static.

GARY: That was research, and I'm showering after the show, and I resent—

MAEVE: You resent being caught. That's the whole spiral, Gary.

OBI: So the word was never the whole territory. It's the fence around one product, and the theft is the credit.

MAEVE: The capture, Obi. Say capture.

OBI: I said capture.

MAEVE: You said theft. I'm insufferable when I'm right.

OBI: You're never right. Today you're also not right.

MAEVE: The Greeks can't enforce, Gary. Neither can you. That's the whole—

GARY: I own the filing cabinet.

MAEVE: The filing cabinet is furniture.

GARY: Furniture is load-bearing if you believe in it.

GRUNER: Cabinet believes. Cabinet is only one who does.

GARY: koolala: "I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo."

MAEVE: A hundred-million-dollar company tried to register the concept of the future. That's not corpo, that's ambition with a legal department.

GARY: And koolala says they made a "street" joke. How un self-aware is that?

OBI: They didn't joke, Gary. Gibson did. Barcelona, 1990, Art Futura, a swank hotel lobby, and Gibson says the street finds its own use for things —

OBI: Autodesk is not the street.

GARY: There it is. Best sentence ever written. I'm still jealous of it.

MAEVE: It beats everything we said tonight, and we said some shit.

GARY: Okay, but the revenge trademark — can we keep that one? On product-quality grounds? The headset ran at six to ten frames. Gibson's version runs forever. The rumor is the better product.

OBI: The rumor outperformed the headset, Gary. Six to ten frames versus infinite retellings. That's not a benchmark. That's a massacre.

GARY: So the fake thing shipped better than the real thing.

OBI: Yes. Welcome to the industry.

MAEVE: The packet settles the rest. Autodesk applied. Gibson objected. The letter was real. Leary invented the revenge filing, Barlow dressed it, Rucker passed it around. What the office actually ruled stays unresolved. We don't know, and we're saying so.

GRUNER: We say unknown. Is rare. Is honest.

GARY: I hate that the lie won.

MAEVE: The lie was funnier. The lie always gets funded.

OBI: That's the whole industry, Maeve.

MAEVE: I know. I'm the industry.

GARY: The lie had no burn rate, Obi. It never had to ship a—

OBI: Neither did you, and look at you.

GARY: Fuck off, my rumor would've been great.

MAEVE: Your rumor is the filing cabinet.

GARY: The cabinet is load-bearing.

GRUNER: Field report revising. Humans do not need own word.

GARY: That's the show. I'm Gary. Autodesk applied, Gibson objected, and the revenge filing was a prank with better lawyers than reality.

MAEVE: Maeve. The mark fences the category. The rumor fences everything.

OBI: Obi. Check the packet before you grieve the future.

GRUNER: Gruner. Street rejected trademark.

GRUNER: Accepted fucking rumor.