A long blog thread’s journey INTA night

Now:  I had mentioned that the Managing IP link I provided in the first INTA post alluded to some pretty interesting fireworks involving the “empty chair” in this debate, i.e., Google.  First, again, from that story:

A Google representative stood up during the Q&A period to remind attendees that the search engine’s ad platform has zero tolerance for counterfeiting, as well as proactive tools for weeding out bad actors.  “You can ask us to monitor your trademarks in ad text and we will take down ads that infringe,” said the Google attorney.

Mmmmm… yeah.  Let’s get a little more granular.  Here’s how it actually went down, courtesy of the official INTA audio (a very nice feature) after the traditional, “Any questions?”:

Hi, my name is Annabelle DanielVarda and I’m with Google… (laughter, scattered applause) … It certainly would have been nice to have had an opportunity to speak on these issues, on the panel, but I have my little piece of paper and I want to speak to some of the issues that I want to get some clarification on.

And in saying she wanted to “get some clarification on” Google Senior Trademark Counsel Annabelle DanielVarda didn’t mean, by “get,” “receive.”  For it is better, as we learned from the video from the previous post, to give than to receive!  And DanielVarda gave “clarification” or, at least, the Google party line — and, after all, we’d been treated to the anti-Google party line for an hour already.

Whether in substance she “gave” as good as she “got,” I don’t know.  But I applaud her corporate boldness — not everyone could pull this off.  This was, as I explained in an earlier post (and notwithstanding the — nervous? — laughter when she introduced herself) a somewhat hostile room.  And here she was standing up there answering the unasked question instead of asking a question, reminding everyone on her employer’s behalf that something was a little off here.  DanielVarda set up her own chair on that panel, put down Google’s marker and then, her work done, galloped off into the night.  Well, the morning.  It was dark in the room however.

I was so impressed with her moxie, and what I thought was a borderline scandalous omission (I have since been informed that it was not intentional, for what that’s worth) that I wanted to ask DanielVarda more.  But I have never met the lady.  So being very tech-savvy, don’t you know, and according to many possessing a little moxie myself — and possessing, too, so very little to lose — I logged onto the INTA Attendee Portal, got Annabelle DanielVarda’s contact information, and — assuming I worked the darn thing right — am pretty sure I sent her an email, explaining that I’m this guy with a blog and was going to write about what happened that morning and maybe we could talk for a minute.

I used my Gmail address.

Maybe it got caught in the spam filter.

More likely I just don’t “get” it.  But, you know… I never really have.