Eric Menhart is still making people mad.
It used to be just e-mail spammers who were upset with him, back when he was a George Washington University student suing them under Maryland law. But now that he's a recently sworn-in D.C. technology attorney, he's angering a different crowd: His colleagues.
In December, Menhart applied for trademark rights on the term "cyberlaw," which also happens to be the name of his personal firm. And it caused a lawyerly outcry among the industry's bloggers, who say the well-worn word clearly belongs in the public domain. Attorneys have maligned Menhart's common sense, called his efforts "silly," and questioned his professional abilities.
"We pretty much gang-heckled him," said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University in California. "People try for the wackiest trademarks all the time, that's not unusual. When a lawyer chooses to do it, that's more interesting. And when a lawyer chooses something goofy, that's really interesting."
Menhart, who is in his late 20s, has responded with a statement on his Web site (www.cyberlaw.pro) justifying the application he filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and complaining about the complaints, particularly what he says are inaccuracies within them. Still this week, he amended the application so it only applies to his company's logo. But he said it's not because of the criticism, which he tried to ignore.
"It was very clear that this was not going to be an academic argument, it was going to be more of a shouting match, and I didn't think it was worth my time to get involved in a shouting match with people that were going to shout louder and had more ammunition in their holsters than I had," Menhart said.
The reason there was such a ruckus is that most seem to see "cyberlaw" as a word that should be free for the using. Trademarking it would be akin to trademarking "Internet" (which a whole bunch of people tried to do back in the early 1990s), according to Menhart's critics.
The term is already used to describe online- and tech-related legal issues in dictionaries and encyclopedias. It appears in dozens of book titles and multiple Web addresses. It's even used to describe law centers at prestigious universities, including Stanford.
"It's been so ubiquitous, it's probably one of the most generic marks I've ever seen," said Iowa attorney Brett Trout. He wrote about the situation on his blog (http:--blog.bretttrout.com) last month and happens to be the author of CyberLaw: A Legal Arsenal for Online Business, which was published last fall.
