Comment by Eric_Gullichsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eric_Gullichsen | Hacker News Reader

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Eric_Gullichsen

Really? The CYBERSPACE trademark application wasn't rejected. It was abandoned in 1991 after the VR project was cancelled and we developers left Autodesk to start Sense8. The recorded disposition was "abandoned—failure to respond or late response."

https://uspto.report/TM/73816876

And yeah, Autodesk was hardly a tiny startup. Its market cap at the end of 1989 was about $945 million.

But the "street" line was a deliberately smartass quotation from Gibson in a letter I wrote, not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture. Gibson subsequently had the better rejoinder: "Autodesk is not the street."

Judging the Autodesk Research Lab of 1989 by the reputation of the company Autodesk later became seems rather ahistorical. Even founder John Walker had already declared himself "Bored (sic) of Directors" by 1988:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_65.html

The street is like nameless individuals. A corpo by contrast is the giant vertical sky-scrapers next to it. Total exact opposites. I don't see it as a clever joke when attached to a hostile trade-mark message. By using it in the opposite way from its actual meaning you embodied the entire antagonist cyberpunk corpo ethos in real life.

Fair enough, but Adobe was an upstart at some point in its life .. I remember the days when the Photoshop set were considered rebellious monkeys who didn't play well with the rest of the print industry .. until they came along and ate the print industry's lunch.

I'd go one step further on Gibsons' statement that the street find its own uses for things, and state that everything starts on the street before it becomes corporate, and then it returns to the street, eventually ...

Plus, Autodesk trademarking the term is partly to prevent others finding use for it ("Cyberspace (TM) refers to a software product of Autodesk, Inc. Were any other software vendor to employ the term for one of their products, Autodesk would justifiable be upset.")

> not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture

Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead...

Such a tone deaf response.

Autodesk tried to trademark a phrase recently invented by an author. They would have had to defend it too. Would they have sued Gibson? Ahistorical my ass

Honestly I don't understand how it was accepted? Obviously Gibson invented it?

I agree with your anger. It sounds like they are actually proud of what they did yet it was 100% bad. They were stealing and threatening someone else's work without any justification and nothing about their story was an apology.

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