Coke frees trademark in Second Life

In an interview with Rebang, David Vanderpoel talks about the company's decision to allow its trademark it be (mostly) freely used in Second Life.

From Rebang:

"After I’d read the secondhand report that Coca-Cola had “released” their trademark, I immediately got to thinking that a) there was no official guidance, and b) even I wouldn’t unconditionally release a trademark.

So I contacted C.C. Chapman who put me through to Vanderpoel. And I’ve got one thing to say: I’m impressed.

First off, my understanding from our conversation is that no one should expect any official guidance from Coca-Cola. Additionally, I was informed that Coca-Cola simply doesn’t want an intermediary policing their brand for them. Nor do they want to interfere with the in-world economy when people are using their brand in ways that do not adversely impact them.

Okay. So that part makes good, reasonable sense to me. But there’s more.

For those people who feel the need to use the Coca-Cola trade dress in ways that are detrimental to the brand’s reputation, Coca-Cola is more interested in establishing a dialog to help them understand why people want to attack them in the first place than they are in trying to stop them.

This is by far the smartest position I’ve seen a company take lately."

David is actually at North Highland Consulting, but is a project lead for Coke in Second Life. In the past Coke has not been a real industry leader in the interactive space. Sure, they were big and there but things just didn't go so well much of the time.

Maybe people like David and Tom are going to change all of that!