William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace

cubefox

Meanwhile, "cyberpunk" has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre. That's like someone trademarking "space opera", "romantasy", "film noir" etc.

jMyles

Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes. https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...

vessenes

It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.

koolala

I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then.

jrochkind1

it's humorous that he thinks that letter was "conciliatory".