[zedshaw]

Actually, my understanding is you can't really trademark titles of things. That's why you'll see books and movies with the same titles and nobody getting sued.

There's also a Perl book that predates my book which I didn't know about, so there's precedent for people to do this already.

Finally, I really don't care so much about the title, I care more about people getting the method right. It looks like this was taken down so I can't comment on how it's written, but my typical beef with these books is they use the title, then they proceed to write a completely different book that doesn't follow the method at all. To me that's just obnoxious arrogance on their part and typical programmer "I can do it better" crap. There's a reason my books are structured the way they are, and just taking the title to pimp a book that isn't even close to the same structure just pisses me off.

But, I haven't seen this book yet so I don't know what it's done.

EDIT: Ok found the google cache, and it looks like this one's doing it right. I officially bless this title in the name of ... like whatever and shit.

[aidenn0]

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can trademark titles. An example is the "X for Dummies[1]" series that has at least threatened to sue people[2].

People currently associate "Learn X the Hard Way" where X is computer related to your lcthw project. If you let other people use it, that distinctiveness will go away and it will likely not be something you could trademark

[1] http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4009:ae... [2]https://www.chillingeffects.org/protest/notice.cgi?NoticeID=...

[cowboyhero]

Very cool. Thanks for the clarification.

Also: I'm not an expert, or a lawyer, but it's my understanding that you can't copyright titles, but you can trademark them, or portions of them.

The guys (IDW?) that publish the "For Dummies" book series regularly enforce the trademarks around their name and cover design.

Hollywood often gets around the copyright problem by trademarking some film titles (this is why it's always "Disney's The Lion King" and not just "The Lion King.")

[daemon13]

Would be great that you do the Linux book whatever the title may be! )