I’m for copyright protection as much as anyone, but it seems there are times when it goes too far. Three examples come to mind. The most recent is the litigation surrounding the term Web 2.0. The term was coined by a company for a conference, but has grown to represent more than that.

Two other, bigger, instances of copyright protection gone awry are Final Four, the NCAA basketball tournament, and Superbowl. Recently broadcast media and advertisers have had to awkwardly dance around these two terms. Copyright them if you like, but allow the use for reasonable purposes. They have grown to larger than life proportion and it doesn’t make sense to prohibit their use, since most uses benefit the authors. Copyright can still be enforced in case of malicious activity.