From today's NYT: Who knew that someone owned the Dewey Decimal System?
Apparently not the owners of the Library Hotel, nestled in the shadow of the New York Public Library. Now the boutique hotel, which numbers its guest rooms and stocks them with books according to Melvil Dewey's century-old library classification system, is being sued for using it.
"The Dewey Decimal System is a product, a trademark, a brand name," said Joseph R. Dreitler, a lawyer for the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit library cooperative that filed the suit last week in Federal District Court in Ohio. "The idea here isn't to put the Library Hotel out of business. The idea is to protect Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System trademark."
