Emerging Technologies

How do you short a private web2.0 company

By Brij ⋅ August 26, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

If there was a way to short a private company then I will go for Digg.

Digg lawyers  send C&D to similar named site called DiggGames. They did what they were getting paid for. Which is to protect Digg’s intellectual property interests. This is a totally legitimate way to protect company’s interests. Comments on TechCrunch are throwing more light on why this is a reasonable thing to do. Do it now or keep your mouth shut forever. That’s how trademark law works.

But…..Digg is no enterprise focused boring supply chain management type  company. They are a company at the forefront of an ideological mashup  of “user generated content”, “wisdom of the crowds”, “creative commons”, “social network”, “citizen journalism”, “next generation media”, “long tail” and I am sure there are more buzzwords out there. So there is a natural expectation that they will not do something old world.

They cannot just cherry pick ethics and legal tools here. They need to get creative and come up with some kind of affiliate or syndication model with these Digg-clones and Digg-fanclubs. One would expect that the young management team of Digg will go that way. Instead they decided to play hardball.

Hardball legal tactics is a legitimate business practice but taking some kind of trademark2.0 model would have played well considering their culture and positioning.

Lets see how this evolves. There will be interesting lessons here.

Update: Created my first Wikipedia entry with the topic of trademark2.0. Please add to it. This issue needs more discussion and understanding. Will be a good experiment to see how quickly this entry gets canned.