Infringing on the Amazon Mark: Kindle Websites

Amazon has a winner in the Kindle e-book and that kind of success demands imitators who want to make money off the Kindle brand by creating source websites or fan pages by using some form of a Kindle-ized URL.

Amazon is forced by these pretend fans to fight them in legal letters and in a court of law, if necessary, because to use the Kindle trademark without explicit permission from Amazon is to infringe upon the innate rights of Amazon.

It doesn't matter if one is celebrating the Kindle or not, no one may use Amazon's brand or intellectual property or the physical manifestations thereof for their own claimed private use on the public web. Intention does not matter. Usage matters.

We applaud Amazon's rightful need to protect their time and investment in the Kindle brand and even if small website owners -- or domain stealers -- complain and cry on their websites and in their blogs about Big Bad Amazon, we can only try to pity them for their transparent attempt to slide along for the ride on the bare back of the Kindle wave.

Kindle in the Classroom

The greatest power in the new Kindle ebook reader from Amazon is the grand possibility of its use in the classroom.

Imagine how easy it would be to deliver up-to-date and of-the-moment textbook information to students?

You could all browse the morning paper together.

Course materials can be emailed and uploaded to the Kindle automagically.

The beauty of Kindle is -- even in the virtual classrooms of Boles University -- we can still use the same traditions and memes of Kindle learning as other on campus classrooms.

Kindle clarifies and evens out the blurry line between traditional teaching and virtual learning.

Kindle makes the virtual real and the real virtual -- and in that combination of ingenuity and inspiration -- comes the real purpose of us all: To carry forward the learning of others so that we may begin to transform memory into meaning in our current lives and to then warn others in the future against the perils of what we already know.