I’m sure this story is going to be all over the LIS blogosphere, but I can’t help myself this time. It looks like OCLC, apparent owners of the Dewey Decimal System, are suing The Library Hotel, accusing the hotel of trademark infringement for their egregious use of DDC. Here’s an article about it: Newsday.com - Library catalog system owner sues book-based New York hotel

And here’s a quote from the article: “I would term it straight-out trademark infringement,” said Joseph R. Dreitler, a trademark lawyer with the Columbus office of Jones Day, which represents the Online center.

“A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system.”

OK, first of all, the average website visitor will be surprised to learn that the DDC has an owner at all. In fact, I think most librarians-in-training are surprised to learn that. Then the aforementioned visitor will be surprised to learn that our profession, working so hard for the propagation of the public domain, is largely under the thumb of a corporation (calling itself nonprofit) that goes out of its way to maintain its singular domination over a system of representing/organizing knowledge. They won’t be surprised, however, to see that the library profession is represented by classification militants with a penchant for bad publicity and an ability to squeeze the fun right out of any good idea. Just the message we need to be sending…