Trek Trak Director replaced?!

[peacelovefandom.livejournal.com]

Just saw this via Roddenberry.com:

Star Trek's "Trek Trak" director Eric Watts has been replaced. He didn't resign, he was replaced.

Link to the article: http://www.roddenberry.com/community/index/detail?id=594

What were they thinking?


EDIT: Costuming Track's Brian Holloway the next to be axed? (Link)

Comments

[jane-says.livejournal.com]

Wow ... just wow. Didn't Eric invent TrekTrak? I know owns the trademark for "TrekTrak".

I'll be sad to see him go. He was always a hoot to be around in the few Dragon*Cons I've gotten to. Well, I guess I'll have to share the vid him dancing around and being generally funny at the Shatner-Nimoy panel, the first 1:30.

[omahastar.livejournal.com]

Correction - He owns the website trektrak.com, but TrekTrak is not trademarked.

[peacelovefandom.livejournal.com]

It does say on the site that it is indeed trademarked?

[omahastar.livejournal.com]

And? It's his website. He can write anything he wants on it. That doesn't mean it reflects reality. The term "trektrak" is not, in reality, registered.

It's actually very simple to find out if something is registered or not. There's a nifty website called the United States Patent and Trademark Office (uspto.gov), which is searchable.

search on trektrak (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4004%3Am00o44.1.1&p_search=searchss&p_L=50&BackReference=&p_plural=yes&p_s_PARA1=&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA1%24LD&expr=PARA1+AND+PARA2&p_s_PARA2=trektrak&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA2%24COMB&p_op_ALL=AND&a_default=search&a_search=Submit+Query&a_search=Submit+Query). No trademark exists. Yet when I search for "Dragon Con" I get four results (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4004%3Am00o44.1.1&p_search=searchss&p_L=50&BackReference=&p_plural=yes&p_s_PARA1=&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA1%24LD&expr=PARA1+AND+PARA2&p_s_PARA2=dragon+con&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA2%24COMB&p_op_ALL=AND&a_default=search&a_search=Submit+Query) related to our convention and two for something completely unrelated from 1987.

What's this all tell us? Eric is mistaken where the facts are concerned, and anyone who is truly questioning him can find out how full of it he is in about 2 minutes on google.

[peacelovefandom.livejournal.com]

No need to get nasty. I didn't know the Trademark database was available online, and the original comment didn't offer proof that it wasn't. Calm down.

[omahastar.livejournal.com]

Ah. Sorry if you took it that way. I wasn't being nasty. I was trying to be helpful. I notice when people post things that others disagree with, generally the first thing they ask for is a link ... proof of what the person is saying. I provided that.

Eric and I have had run-ins in the past. I think he's a self-important jerk with an overinflated ego. See, I dared question him once on why he was making the TT panels about himself instead of about the guests. He threatened to have me expelled from the convention. Then he went into the TT yahoo group and banned me. Since I didn't ask it in a harsh way, nor did I yell at him or do anything other than ask a question (a politely worded one, too), his response was just a wee bit over the top.

I'm sure there are those who sit back and enjoy whatever Eric did, and that's great. I am not one of them, and I'm thrilled he's been fired. It should have happened back when he first started the track's decline instead of letting it continue to devolve.