Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by quuquuquu | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

quuquuquu·

Side topic: In the USA, what is the legal precedent for business competitors having a very similar name?

If I name my social network for race car drivers "Racebook, Inc.", and my logo is a blue square with a white "r" on it,

am i opening myself up to legal trouble?

View on HN

A while back, somebody created an Imgur knockoff called Slimgur. He specifically created it because Imgur was enforcing its TOS banning hate speech, and he didn't like that. Imgur threatened to sue, and he was forced to change his site's name, first to Slimgr, and eventually to sli.mg (though the second change was because he lost the domain when the registrar found out he was letting his users upload child porn).

Yeah, this seems like a probable trademark violation as it's likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. I expect they'll have to change it.

A guideline for determining trademark infringement is "confusingly similar". Also trademarks have scope and so operating in the same business/domain.

Unlike copyrights or patents, if trademarks aren't well protected they can be considered forfeited (Bayer's Aspirin is a pretty common example). So you could imagine Facebook or Reddit reacting pretty swiftly in the case of examples like yours or OP.

Interestingly, right after YouTube became popular a ton of -tube websites popped up, it was before they were bought by Google so they didn't have the money to sue and I'm guessing by the time Google bought them they probably no longer had a good case.

Remember Twitter and Twitpic? I imagine raddit is not okay.

Twitpic got bullied, it didn't lose in a court of law.

See trademark dilution

It'll be Lawyers at 100 paces.

whoever has the baddest lawyer wins. (or the largest number of baddest lawyers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com