Name Change silliness

[Dale Worley]

On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 14:47 -0700, Stephen Samuel wrote:
> So the group was forced to roll over a second time.

As a general rule, in business, pride is a very expensive commodity.
And it's generally a bad idea to get into a piss-fight with someone who
has a *lot* more money than you do.

> From a "kick them in the nuts and run" attitude, I would have
> publicized this history and threatened to castrate their trademark if
> they insisted on threatening GAIM developers.

In regard to generating evil publicity, such things are like holding
hostages -- once you shoot the hostage, there's no reason for the SWAT
team to not storm the building.

> What was the lawyers' rationalle for keeping the negotiations secret?

If your lawyers are any good, they did float the possibility of bad
publicity and also the possibility that AOL's trademark was vulnerable.
That was part of the leverage to get from AOL whatever it was that you
were trying to get from AOL.

Dale