Freecycle(TM): or how to make a gift to the world a registered trademark

Back in May of 2005, a lot of my friends were moving away and something revolutionary happened... My friend Mitch said, "I'm going to freecycle my stuff." I had never heard anyone use the word before; "freecycle" is both beautiful and magical. I instantly knew that he meant he was giving his things away instead of throwing them away. Throughout the summer my friends took his cue (and my inquiring about their things), and freely gave away many things that could have easily been sold. As a direct result of that and my having no roommate for three months, I accumulated a new set of dishes, new coffee tables, a new desk, and a new TV, and more small stuff than I can begin to remember. At the end of the summer, I was talking with a friend about how cool it would be to start a freecycle group specifically for our neighborhood. There's one for Los Angeles, but the whole of LA is just too big. I'm not going to drive to the home of someone I have no connection with in order to find out if their free couch will actually fit in my living room, or to riffle through the junk they're throwing out to see if they have junk I was intending to buy (like C batteries, or what have you). So I started throwing freecycle barbeques.

Almost everyone I know uses freecycle in the exact same way that the word recycle is used. I freecycled my old desk when I got a new one. That hippie got all of her clothes through freecycling. Freecycle your crap: stop sending it to landfills! Freeclyclers reduce the need for landfills, and the energy consumption required to make new goods.

The whole idea of having freecycle be a tradmarked word is RIDICULOUS. The whole idea is to create a gift based economy, which does require you to loosen your ideas about ownership. Just because someone else one used it, and possibly in a radically different way, doesn't mean isn't still good enough for you to use the way you need to use it (my new desk for ground-sitting was Mitch's coffee table). Just because you used to own it, or because you made it doesn't mean you'll own it forever (you're not a pharoh, you can't take things to the afterlife). So, Freecycle(TM) Network, why don't you give the world the greatest gift us all and allow us to freely use the term freecycle...