The IT Skeptic - Comments for "ITIL intellectual property"

"trademarks are never about

skeptic — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:37:58 +0000

"trademarks are never about granting monopolies, argues David Bernstein, a lawyer for YSL at Debevoise and Plimpton. Trademarks are merely the right to indicate the origin of a product or service."

The Economist

Spirit of V1

JamesFinister — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:58:53 +0000

Certainly in the early days the issue was getting the private sector to support ITIL, rather than stopping inappropriate commercialization.

Hence the V1 Managers' course material that was developed by CCTA and the CSC was then given away to anyone who wanted it, and so went on to form the basis of almost all V1 Manager courses. Having seeded the market HMG (in the guise of the CSC) was then happy to pull out of the training market and leave it entirely to the private sector.

The drift towards defending IP rights started when some of the less scrupulous commercial organizations began to make moves to claim ITIL IP rights for themselves, and as HMG's approach changed, with HMSO being hived off as as commercial organization in its own right.

James

+0.2

skeptic — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:33:00 +0000

This is exactly the same text as the 1.1.1 mentioned above, except +0.2.0

it suggests that ITIL was originally public domain in spirit (any comments from those involved in ITIL V1??), although it has always been Crown Copyright in fact

Not-so-Public Domain...

kengon — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:40:20 +0000

Skep,

In preparation for a recent webinar that I conducted on BrightTALK, I found myself re-examining the "Planning to Implement Service Management" (Green Book) and "The Business Perspective" (Purple Book). It was great fun to get reacquainted with this material. Here's one of the things that caught my eye.

In the Purple Book, on p.4, you'll find

“1.3.1 Public Domain Framework
From the beginning, ITIL has been publicly available. This means that any organization can use the framework described by the OGC in its numerous books. Because of this, a wide range of organizations including local and central government, energy, public utilities, retail, finance and manufacturing have used ITIL guidance. Very large organizations, very small organizations and everything in between have implemented ITIL processes.”

In the Green Book, on p.2, you'll find

“1.3.1 Deleted”

I'm wondering how this came about. Would love to hear the story at some point. I think we'll hear about it when we hear the true story of the JFK assassination! LOL

Enjoy,
kengon

I own all diagrams with circles and squares - back off!

ianclayton — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:29:06 +0000

Nice balance and general overview of the thorny subject of intellectual property rights and as an author one I am keen to get as much publicity through visibility at your website and others.

Its my understanding that if I left my notes for my next book in the trash and restarted the draft, for it to be picked up by someone trawling dumpsters and turned into a book - it remains my copyright material. This assumes I can prove my claim of invention - that I wrote the original, and that no interest in that was transferred to the trawler.

There are so many concepts out there in the realm of service management. And as IT Service Management begins to encroach upon the pre-existing realm of service management as defined by some in product management, through the recent habit of some to just drop the 'IT', I see more interesting term and concept-wars....

For example, can anyone lay claim to the term 'body of knowledge', or the acronym/word 'BOK'? I mean, the BOK Tower in Florida goes back as far as c1928.... so context must have something to do with it. What about the concepts of a 'RACI Chart', lifecycle, or perhaps even a continuous improvement program? What is you restate the definition of a term - and offer a new description for something as mundane as a 'service catalog' or 'service level agreement'?

What if you diagram a workflow using squares and circles and it looks very similar to someone else because you were both trying to diagram a similar subject - such as change management? So much landscape, but its safe to assume that if you stumble across the draft of a book in the office trash bin - its owned by someone... not you.