In New York, there’s a highly regarded boutique hotel called the Library Hotel. It overlooks the NY Public Library, hence the name.

Each of the hotel’s ten floors honours one of the ten categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, as used in libraries around the world. And each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the ‘category’ it belongs to.

It’s cute and clever and, I’m told, beautifully done. A great venue for writers to relax. But over the last couple of months, things have turned sour: the US legal press has been full of stories of the hotel being sued by the owners of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Yes, someone owns the DDC.

Initial press reports expressed incredulity - not only that the DDC should be ‘owned’, but also that the owners should have the affront to sue a small hotel for paying homage to the DDC.

Now that the full story has come out, the heroes and villains are not so clear. The DDC is owned by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a non-profit organisation. It appears that for three years, OCLC attempted to get the Library Hotel to sign some form of agreement - acknowledging that the hotel's use of the Dewey Decimal System was granted by permission of OCLC.

For the first two years they heard nothing, claims Joseph Dreitler, the OCLC’s lawyer. Last year, however, the Library Hotel's owner, Henry Kallan, finally responded. "He basically told OCLC to get lost," Dreitler claims. "All OCLC needed was a piece of paper they could put in their file." Dreitler said the OCLC has no objection to the hotel's use of the Dewey Decimal system, and was never seeking payment.

But in trademark law, he says, trademarks must be vigorously defended or otherwise lost: "If a company that owns the rights to a trademark allows that trademark to be used in such a way that it is no longer associated with their product, it is abandoned. This is not something OCLC wanted to do, but they had to do it to protect their trademark rights from such large-scale use. They were pushed against a wall."

Dreitler stresses that it was never the intention of OCLC to seek a slice of the hotel's profits or prevent the hotel from using its clever theme. But he remains at a loss to explain why the hotel never dealt with OCLC before the lawsuit was filed. "This could've and should've been resolved without getting me involved," he says. The Library Hotel has denied any wrongdoing and could not confirm whether Kallan refused to co-operate with OCLC requests. In a statement, hotel General Manager Craig Spitzer said that Kallan was travelling in Europe but would speak to reporters on his return.

This one could be interesting.