Suppose there were a David Isenberg who acted so badly that he ing! Under trademark law, if I were the besmirched the reputation of all us other David Isenbergs? firstest with the mostest, the bull-goose columnist; if when you said, “David Isenberg the telecom columnist,” everybody thought of me, and nobody thought of the other guy, then I could go to court to compel the imposter to write under a different name.
In addition, I could go one step further. I could register David Isenberg as a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (PTO). I’d have to register it in a particular class of business; for example, I could register David Isenberg as an ad- vertising business, but then I could not stop somebody from selling groceries under the name of David Isenberg, no matter how confusing or how embarrassing it might be.
Here’s the rub. Suppose I had been doing business as the undisputed David Isenberg, telecom columnist, for many years. Meanwhile suppose that somebody else had registered David Isenberg with the PTO for the business of writing. And suppose this David-Isenberg-come-lately asserted that I must stop using my name for column writing. And, finally, suppose it would cost years, thousands of dollars, and untold amounts of bad energy to fight back.
In such a situation, there’s a right thing and a very different, prudent thing. Before the Internet, two David Isenbergs in similar businesses might never know of each other. But today, as the Internet brings us together, it collapses name space, so we’re all semantic neighbors. We need new ways to deal with names and identities, not just in business, but in every aspect of our lives. Where should we start? V
The package of military strategy monographs was addressed to David Isenberg at my house, but I couldn’t understand why. Then when I Googled “Isenberg” and “military,” I immediately found another David Isenberg, a Senior Analyst at BASIC, the British American Security Information Council, a think tank on global security. I phoned BASIC in Washington, D.C., and reached my nominal doppelganger. Clearly this David Isenberg was the intended recipient. We exchanged addresses and pleasantries. I repacked the papers and sent them off. Later, I dipped into his military strategy writings. They were good! I felt proud to be confused with him.
Here’s another true story. Once at a conference, I was surprised to find that I had already registered–and paid! No dental exams for this horse; I put on my badge and went a-mingling. A friend pointed at my badge and asked if I’d changed my middle initial. I looked down and saw “David A. Isenberg.” I wheeled and bulled to the front of the registration line to report the mistake. I stood next to a puzzled man facing a harried registration clerk. “I can’t find your badge,” the clerk said. I put my badge on the counter preparing to declare the mistake, when the fellow exclaimed, “There’s my badge!” And that’s how David S. Isenberg met David A. Isenberg, Senior Product Director of Atlantic Broadband. Atlantic Broadband is a surviving Cable TV competitor, in the top 20 with a strong triple-play offering. I would not be embarrassed to be confused with him either.
Fortunately my name is not Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, or Brown, which are the five most frequent family names in the 1990 U.S. Census. Nobody but the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is apt to think that John Smith is a unique identifier. On the other hand, a name like David Isenberg is unlikely enough that people were confused, in fact, on at least two occasions. I calculate, using name frequencies in the 1990 Census data, that there are about 150 David Isenbergs in the United States. I suspect I could find them all with a reasonable search engine.
The Evil Isenberg
But woah! Suppose there were a David Isenberg who acted so badly that he besmirched the reputation of all us other David Isenbergs? The other 149 of us would be out of luck. There’d be nothing we could do but endure the embarrassment or change our names. But there are no guarantees that a new name would be immune from other bad actors with that name.
Here’s another possibility. Suppose there were another David Isenberg who was a telecom columnist! Very confus-
David S. Isenberg ( isen@isen.com) is author of The Rise of the Stupid Network and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
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