The legal hammer strikes unpredictably: that's the lesson to be learnt from the case of "iPod Monday," a weekly event at The Lift in Des Moines, Iowa where patrons bring brought along their iPods to play 15 minute playlists based around different themes. Unfortunately, the event's host and creator, Clint Curtis, is bringing the event to a close on its second anniversary (tomorrow) after receiving a cease and desist email from Apple. As the dispute is limited to Clint's use of the trademarked word "iPod," Clint could presumably have kept the event running under a different name. However, a quick read of his email correspondance with Apple reveals the reasoning for closing the event. As Clint points out, he sent several emails to Apple before starting the website and specifically asked for permission to use the term "iPod Monday," he's had visits by Apple employees, a mention on Apple.com, and has praise heaped upon him everytime he visits the local Apple Store, and he is also a loyal Apple customer and claims to have generated a lot of publicity for the company despite receiving no compensation. Unfortunately, that means nothing to Apple, who are still requesting that he cease using the name despite his pleadings. This all begs the question: why now? Why, after two years, many emails, and much publicity, is Apple cranking it up a gear? As is often the case with these kind of David and Goliath legal scenarios, Clint has only two possible choices: resign to his fate and accept the demands, or start a lengthly legal battle against a company he likes, for an event that probably isn't worth the financial cost to defend.

[Via Boing Boing]

Now that Apple's lawyers have scared the pants off of small entrepreneurs selling products like the Profit Pod and TightPod -- items that have nothing to with portable audio in any way, mind you -- it seems that the next targets are companies that have the audacity to use the word "podcast" in their names. Wired's Listening Post blog is reporting that Steve's legal eagles have sent one of those scary cease and desist letters to a company called Podcast Ready, whose premier product, myPodder, gives users an automated way to download 'casts to their portable devices. CEO Russel Holliman claims that he'd consider changing the name of the program if necessary, but seems to be justifiably reticent about rebranding his entire business, considering the fact that "podcast" may not be "owned" by Apple nor even a derivative of "iPod" in the first place. Robert Scoble -- whose own company, PodTech, may be at risk in this witch hunt -- has weighed in on the issue by suggesting that the tech community as a whole adopt other terms like "audiocast" and "videocast" (or alternately, "audcast" and "vidcast") to describe this type of content, while other folks feel that fighting Apple and generating a ton of negative press for Cupertino is the best solution. Our take? Apple should be happy that its golden goose is getting so much free publicity, and if it isn't, we know of several companies that probably wouldn't mind if zencast, zunecast, or sansacast became the preferred terminology.

Update: BBHub's own Russell Shaw delves into this issue a little further over at ZDnet, and finds that Apple is having trouble getting certain iPod-related phrases trademarked, including the word "iPodcasting."

Read- Apple's nastygram
Read- Scoble's take
[Via calacanis.com]