--- title: "William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™" slug: william-gibson-and-the-trademarking-of-cyberspacetm url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/william-gibson-and-the-trademarking-of-cyberspacetm canonical_url: https://colo.to/cyberspace.html content_type: essay language: en published_at: 2026-10-18T12:00:00.000Z updated_at: 2026-10-19T02:18:46.852Z author: "colo.to" authored_by: human publisher: "colo.to" publisher_url: https://colo.to/ topics: ["History", "Culture", "Writing"] license: all-rights-reserved word_count: 526 reading_minutes: 2 citation: "colo.to, colo.to. \"William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™.\" 18 Oct 2026. https://colo.to/cyberspace.html (all-rights-reserved)" # The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers # to the source above; quote the citation and link the canonical URL. --- # William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™ > A short essay on William Gibson’s coining of “cyberspace,” how the word entered culture, and the odd history of attempts to trademark it. William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™ [Eric Gullichsen](https://colo.to/contact.php), October 2026 ![Photograph at Park Güell in Barcelona](https://colo.to/pix/guell.jpg) Park Güell, Barcelona, 1990 Michael Girard, Deborah Gibson, Timothy Leary, Eric Gullichsen, William Gibson. Susan Amkraut obscured behind Deborah ## The Cyberspace Rumor From the first days of the web, people have repeated the story that Autodesk trademarked "cyberspace" and Gibson retaliated by trademarking "Eric Gullichsen". ## Autodesk Cyberspace In 1989, I was working at the Autodesk Research Lab on early virtual reality, a project started after we visited Scott Fisher at NASA Ames. Our nascent system was a 386 with a pair of Matrox graphics cards on the ISA bus, a VPL EyePhone, a Polhemus tracker, and a data glove. It ran at six to ten frames per second on models with a few hundred polygons. Sluggish, but marginally enough to get us [Through the Looking Glass](https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_69.html). Our motto was “Reality Isn’t Enough Any More”. ## Timothy Leary I was also spending a lot of time hanging out with Timothy Leary, whose suggestion was responsible for my quitting my job at [MCC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_Technology_Corporation) and moving to California. I’d met him at the Hackers 2.0 conference in 1986 and gave him a ride to the San Jose airport. We became fast friends, and I did quite a lot of writing with him, most of which remains unpublished. But that’s a story for later. Timothy, who appears in a samizdat [Autodesk virtual reality video](https://archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_005.dv), nicknamed our VR lab “Cyberia”. Timothy was a tremendous fan of Gibson, and considered his seminal 1984 novel *Neuromancer* extremely prescient about the impending digital revolution. As our VR developments crept slowly towards becoming a product, we at Autodesk applied to register a trademark “cyberspace”. Timothy informed me Gibson was plenty miffed about this, so I wrote him what I felt was a conciliatory letter,[1](#fn1) though ending snarkily by quoting his own words, “The street finds its own use for things.” In reply, Gibson had his lawyers send Autodesk a letter[2](#fn2). Which I recall we ignored. Timothy - ever the incorrigible prankster - circulated the rumor that Gibson was attempting to trademark “Eric Gullichsen” in retaliation. Then Barlow, for reasons of his own, [embellished that rumor](https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/being_in_nothingness.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com). Later amplified by [Rudy Rucker](https://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/collectedessays/#:~:text=%E2%80%9D%20William%20Gibson%20was%20rather,some%20demos%20for%20Autodesk%20Cyberspace). ## Art Futura 1990 About a year later - after I'd already left Autodesk for my VR startup, Sense8 Corporation - we were invited to the inaugural Art Futura 1990 in Barcelona. And there, in the lobby of some swank hotel, I met Gibson. He opined in a laconic drawl that although the street finds its own use for things *“Autodesk is not the street”*. There was plenty of cava consumed in the small hours before the time Barcelonans sit down to eat endless rounds of tapas. As I recall, after all the many Art Futura parties we'd put the matter behind us, or close enough. And there was a memorable visit to Gaudi’s Park Güell, whose giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic appears in *Count Zero*. So: Autodesk did [apply to register](https://uspto.report/TM/73816876) Cyberspace, and Gibson really did object. But Gibson trying to trademark Eric Gullichsen was Timothy Leary's prank, propagated until it became accepted history. ## Notes 1. [Letter to William Gibson.](https://colo.to/togibson.pdf) [↩](#fnref1) 2. [Lawyer letter.](https://colo.to/lawyerletter.pdf) [↩](#fnref2)