FC: Pillsbury sends lawyer nastygrams to geeks using term "bake-off"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

**********

From: "Ron Acher" <ron () pulver com>
To: "Declan McCullough" <declan () well com>
Subject: Pillsbury and Bake-Offs
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:59:25 -0500

Hi Declan:

Rich Shockey suggested I contact you re the following item which may be of
interest to your readers.

Jeff Pulver, CEO of Pulver.com, is taking a position regarding recent
cease and desist actions by the Pillsbury Company concerning the term
"Bake-Off."

In tomorrow's issue of the Pulver Report, his monthly e-mail to nearly
70,000 insiders in the IP Communications community, he says:

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 Pillsbury Bakes-Off against the SIP Developer Community

The Pillsbury Company, owners of the "Doughboy" and other trademarks, has
taken aim at the worldwide computer and telecom technology development
communities by sending cease and desist letters to the hosts and sponsors
of technology industry standards "bake-off" contests, including those
involved with the recent 6th SIP Bake-off.   Pillsbury has a longstanding
trademark on the term "bake-off," and claims that the generally accepted
use of this term in our industries is confusing and interferes with their
branding!

A little history.  In 1949, Pillsbury staged the first national cooking
competition at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Planned as a one-time
event, the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest became so popular that it has become
an American institution -- and the term "bake-off" has gone into general
usage throughout the world. For example, the European Telecommunications
Association cites Webster's Dictionary's definition of a "bake-off" as a
"baking contest, especially among amateur cooks, in which entries must be
prepared and baked within a stipulated time," without any reference to
the Pillsbury trademark. It also explains that in the engineering world,
the term refers to events where engineers get together to test their
implementations of new standards one against the other. These events are
part of the standards development process and an important means of
enhancing the quality of the final deliverable.

According to Henning Schulzrinne, Associate Professor of Computer Science
and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University (one of the institutions
which has received a cease and desist letter from Pillsbury), who has been
helping to organize the Session Initiation Protocol interoperability
testing events in our industry under the name SIP Bake-Off, the first
known use of the term in the now common engineering sense was in 1979,
referred to in a 1987 Web posting on the TCP & IP Bake-Off regarding RFC
1025.

Even a casual search on the Google search engine produces about 44,100
hits on the term "bake-off." While many of these refer to Pillsbury, a
very large number do not, supporting the notion that this term has become
associated with a wide variety of food-related and non-food-related
competitive activities.

While I can appreciate that Pillsbury might object to some of the
food-related ones, I do not think that Pillsbury's aggressively legal
approach to the developer community is good for Pillsbury or for the
companies participating in technology bake-offs. Our friends have no
interest in spending large sums of  money on lawyers to dispute Pillsbury.

In fact, I think Pillsbury should be pleased that the term has become
so much of an American institution that it has gone into general usage,
and that far from diluting the fame of the Pillsbury event associated with
the term, it enhances it by bringing it to a wider audience. I believe
Pillsbury's business interests would be better served by aligning itself
with the professional institutions such as Columbia University and ETSI
who organize bakeoffs, to foster further positive associations of
Pillsbury with the term.

Why should Pillsbury unnecessarily create a situation in which people
come to a negative view of their company, or worse still from any
company's perspective, to come to think of them as petty, trivial,
bullying, overbearing, or even  ridiculous?

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Please feel free to use this.

Sincerely,

-- Ron Acher

ron () pulver com




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