Israeli media article on mmoes (PDF translation). I recently found out that there’s an article online at some kind of Israeli website (feel free to read it if you can understand Hebrew) all about the Cloudmakers, AI, Lockjaw and mmoes. I was quite happy about the way it linked to all the appropriate websites and was a good introduction to the topic. I then thought – hold on a second, as far as I know, I’m the person who coined the term mmoe. So why don’t I get a credit?
Of course, I conceded, it’s possible that someone else thought of mmoe before I did, so I did a Google search on it. As it turns out, there is one instance of someone else using mmoe before I’d thought of it, in February on a messageboard (see the fourth post). This means that I can’t claim to have invented the acronym, although I can take some consolation in the fact that I was the first person to use it in terms of AI-like games. And of course I still should’ve been credited by that article (I find it highly unlikely that the author got mmoe from a single messageboard post). Oh well.
mssv 
You’ve just targeted the dark side to the ideal of “free information exchange over the net”, which is, succinctly, this: If you don’t clearly and legally claim credit for your ideas, then they default to being part of the public domain.
Suggestion: register “mmoe” as a trademark, if you are duly concerned with attribution? Or, if not, be prepared to have the term freely co-opted by the press, without attribution. Ideals of “fair play” count for little or nothing in the freewheeling net-sphere until they are backed up with the cudgel of due legal process.
JM
I’m not too bothered about trademarking mmoe, it seems a bit pointless and I’d rather see it used as widely as possible with the minimum of hassle. I’m more bothered about the fact that there wasn’t any kind of link to this website in the article despite my belief that the author clearly visited here and took a lot of ideas and info.