Kevin Standlee (kevin_standlee) wrote,
Kevin Standlee
kevin_standlee

So Much For That

If you are someone who insisted that nobody would ever make commercial or professional use of the Hugo Award registered service mark to claim that they were individually and personally Hugo Award winners on account of having contributed to An Archive of Our Own, you are flat-our wrong. It's happening, and I'm not talking about "jokes" or "one-two-millionth of a Hugo Award winner" statements. The WSFS Mark Protection Committee is doing what it can about such things. Despite what some people seem to think, the first step in such cases is almost never LAWYER UP and FILE A LAWSUIT. But it uses up resources that are rather limited. I wish we didn't have to do so. I wish that I hadn't been right about people doing what I predicted they would do.

Note, by the way, that the MPC hasn't even been actively searching for infringements. They're being reported to us by individual people not connected to WSFS in any official way, but (for example) people who have run across such a claim that a given individual is a "Hugo Award winning author" on their professional (i.e. pay me money for the words I've written) social media/websites, and they've come to TheHugoAwards.org trying to figure out what it was they actually won.

If you're a member of AO3's community, I suggest you try to persuade your fellow members that making commercial use of AO3's win to claim individual and personal ownership of a Hugo Award win is not a good thing. I'm not talking about silly jokes here. I'm talking about people chipping away at the Hugo Award one real, commercial, professional infringement at a time.
Tags: "hugo award"
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