An interesting tale of ITIL trademarks
Here is an interesting story of the use of the ITIL name....
I take these lessons from this:
1) Lawyers are incapable of subtlety or nuance, or even thinking much.
2) Build an open content website and they won't come.
3) Axelos are going to enforce ITIL trademark in exactly the same way as TSO did, with a shotgun: scattered widely and nothing nice about it. I suspect this is the same blundering about that TSO used to do: set a junior in the legal department to do some web searches on "ITIL" and fire off a letter or email to anywhere you can find an address.
4) Axelos have a curious view of trademark law. My understanding of this (your mileage may vary; consult a legal professional etc etc) is that you can talk about ITIL all you want. You can even describe what it is and what it says. My understanding is that the purpose of trademark protection is to prevent you from pretending that you are selling ITIL, or that you are part of ITIL, or that you are approved by ITIL; or to prevent you from producing a competing product that looks like ITIL in such a way that people might mistake it for ITIL. So I would be interested to see Axelos's claims tested in a court of law. My suspicion is that they are over-reaching: it's a bluff.
Made in New Zealand 
