We received a DMCA takedown notice yesterday which is a first for us here at scouta.com. And it is a beauty.

Web Sherriff acting for the White Stripes sent us a DMCA takedown notice (asking us to remove content or links) for a YouTube video for the White Stripes’ Song Icky Thump which has been placed on YouTube by Warner Bros Records (the White Stripe’s label). 

There’s a strange copyright enforcement loop here and I’m sure you can see it:

1. Warner Bros Music put the video on YouTube.  They allow embedding and playing the video embedded.  You can still go there and embed the video in your blog. Go on.
2. The YouTube video get added to scouta favourites by a scouta user. (Scouta’s CEO Richard Giles, as it turns out)
3. Robots or humans at WebSherriff acting for the White Stripes, issue Scouta with a takedown notice for the Scouta fave (pdf).

Mad, isn’t it.  One arm adds something to YouTube and positively encourages sharing and the other arm issues takedown notices for sharing.  

It must be a mixup or confusion or overzealous robot, surely.

Anyway, in the meantime we’ve removed the link to YouTube (that’s just sensible when dealing with the DMCA) pending and explanation from WebSherriff.  There’s a link to this post instead on that scouta fave url.

I propose we call this kind of two-armed bumble an Icky Thump.

We’ll let you know what happens, and I’m sure we’ll have that item back in Scouta shortly.

More on this in an excellent article at TechCrunch.

[Update: there’s now a Scouta Group to hold media around this story.  And Richard discusses the issue with Cameron Reilly on the G’Day World Podcast #259]

As I mentioned in the last blog post, we’re now moving along quickly. The company structure is now formalised, we have a bank account, and we’re spending money. The later, which is of course exciting, is also scary. There really isn’t any turning back when you’ve started spending investors money.

Other than development and design, we’ve spent a little money on trademarking the name of our service (we’ll soon make that public). I felt it was important to trademark, though as I eluded to a few weeks back, I have my concerns. On the one hand we want to protect ourselves from any malicious intent, and so making sure our brand isn’t misused is import. However, we’d still love to support anyone wanting to mashup, remix, or support our service without hamstringing them legally. I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

I emailed Chris Messina asking him about his community mark idea the other day. He responded and pointed to an interview he did recently on EdTechTalk, and Mozilla using the CM idea for the RSS Icon.

It looks like an untested idea at this stage, not as established as Creative Commons. So we’ll have to keep an eye on where it all goes. Hopefully we’ll still be able to work with our community and in some fashion allow the use of our “mark,” if possible at all.

Saying that, it was exciting to apply for a trademark. Marketing being my bag, it really felt like we’re on the road to starting a fun and exciting brand.

Over on my Clique Communications weblog, I’ve been following the current TechCrunch trademark issues.

I’ll be investigating trademarks in relation to Web2Thing shortly (now that we’ve finalised the actual service name), and it’s prompted several thoughts on my part.

Obviously we need to protect our business. So trademarking a logo and name makes a great deal of sense. In this instance it’s an original name, so it’s not like we’ll be encumbering a generic term (like “web 2.0″ or “real estate 2.0″).

However, we’d obviously love to encourage the people who enjoy the service to extend the use of the site, or use it in interesting ways, like mash-ups, remixes, or reusing the term in ways that don’t actually damage us. So my question is, like Creative Commons in terms of copyright, is there a way to protect a logo or business name, without restricting interesting or fun uses by others?

I met with a couple of patent lawyers a couple of weeks ago.

Amongst the “web 2.0″ crowd, patents are a dirty word, and in all honesty we’ve belayed looking into the matter here at web2thing headquarters because it’s such a controversial topic. Patents hinder innovation, because it takes a serious amount of money to not only apply for one, but also to ensure that you’re not breaching others. However, investors love them because it shows you’re invested, and you own some IP.

The meeting set us on a path of investigation, where we’ve spent many hours searching online databases for patents that may relate to our system. Luckily part of our system deals with a concept that isn’t so new, so a bunch of those patents are old. We’re also innovating in the space, so we believe we’ll be improving a few other areas as well.

The long and the short of it is that any company that is dealing in the technology space, and creating a new product, should do their homework with respect to patents. At the very least you’ll expand you’re knowledge of the particular area. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on potential competition, because I know who holds what patents.

For anyone that is keen, you can search for U.S. patents using the USPTO search engine.