I was initially very happy to see that Micah Sifry of TechPresident.com chose to stand strong in the face of a challenge from Mike Arrington and TechCrunch. I’ll try to make a long story short here.

A few days ago the gang over at TechCrunch launched their Tech President Primaries. I got wind of this via a blog post by Neville Hobson. I then wrote my own analysis of the situation titled The Real Tech President.

In my post I point out the fact that the TechPresident team has been at this for quite a while and seems very committed to the effort. TechCrunch on the other hand is showing up in the game with an offering that appears to be purely a traffic play to increase views of the growing amount of display ads on the TechCrunch site. Why else would they allow, “One ballot per user per day will be counted in the final vote.”?

If I were the folks at TechPresident I would be pretty perturbed that Arrington and Co. chose to use the name Tech President (notice the space) which is almost exactly the name of the effort that Micah and his team have been working under for the last year. It is very confusing. It might be trademark infringement. At the very least it is in poor taste. A google search for “tech president” would have brought up the techPresident.com website as the first result.

Micah Sifry responded strong with a blog post explaining the techPresident position on the issue called TechCrunch Commits Identity Theft. I was glad to see Micah standing up for the brand they’ve created over there. Unfortunately Micah follows up with another post where he backs off the strong position, even though TechCrunch never even responded to his objections over the similarities.

Micah was convinced to back off by, “…several wiser and cooler heads with many years of experience in the trenches…” Oh brother. Another blogger scared off by the Mike Arrington mafia.

Here’s are Micah’s concerns, “What I still am concerned with is plain old public confusion. The simple and decent thing for TechCrunch to do is to post some kind of disclaimer, in the relevant places, making clear that its Tech President Primary and Endorsement are not connected to this blog.”

Seems like a very sane thought to me. You spend months building a brand and a community then someone swoops in and steals the name. I would hope that TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde responds to this issue publicly. It is a serious one. I wouldn’t count on it though. They’re not exactly stepped in professionalism and kindness over there.