From Tom Raftery’s Blog:

IT@Cork is a not-for-profit networking organisation for IT professionals. IT@Cork organises regular information and networking events which are free for its members.

One of these events - the upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter (below) from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0″ and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0″ is a “flagrant violation” of their trademark rights!

I can’t imagine O’Reilly will do anything except apologise. It has to be a case of headless chicken legal departments surely? Read the post and all the comments.

Update: Here’s the official response on O’Reilly Radar. They’ve apologised and said that Web 2.0 can be used.

In retrospect, we wish we’d contacted the IT@Cork folks personally and talked over the issue before sending legal correspondence. In fact, it turns out that they asked Tim to speak at the conference, though our Web 2.0 Conference team didn’t know that. We’ve sent a followup letter to Donagh Kiernan, agreeing that IT@Cork can use the Web 2.0 name this year. While we stand by the principle that we need to protect our “Web 2.0″ mark from unauthorized use in the context of conferences, we apologize for the way we initially handled the issue with IT@Cork.