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Comment by Whitestrake | Hacker News Reader

> The authors are also wasting no time in going after forks[1] to complain about trademark infringement, so if you want to distribute your own patched Caddy builds you can expect to hear from their lawyers. Absolutely devoid of class.

This in particular doesn't seem fair. Trademark really requires trademark holders to make active efforts to preserve their trademarks as soon as they're aware of potential breaches, or they invite risk. And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell.

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There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith.

>And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell.

Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

> Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

A valid point, and one we both know the answer to - I won't try to argue otherwise.

While I think their statement on the issue page was not handled very well, and I would have tried to avoid the implicit threat... Do you think they should have just left it alone without saying anything once they were made aware of it?

I think they should have waited more than a few minutes to start hassling the fork about it.

Yeah, they could have got away with waiting, maybe even a few days for everything to settle before making contact.

But they're here in this thread, paying attention to the discussion, and people have wasted no time in making the fork in the first place.

At the very least, I think the "absolutely devoid of class" comment is uncalled for. I don't think it's unreasonable, not even in terms of time frame, even if I disagree with the manner in which it was done.

> Yeah, they could have got away with waiting, maybe even a few days for everything to settle before making contact.

What frustrated me was that I'd already turned on the issue tracker and created an issue to monitor progress on removing links and references to Caddy.

Unfortunately the "distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name" can be problematic from a trademark perspective. This has come up many times before in other projects and led Debian to not use trademarked project names for software. If you are not familiar with the discussions, just search for "IceWeasel".

You're right, I hadn't thought of that. I still think going after a fork within minutes of its establishment for trademark infringement is in very bad faith, though.

And I think this is the crux of the issue with the trademark threats. They're going after these forks that haven't yet had enough time to signal intent to violate trademark, however pending it may be. You can say that they're just protecting their mark and that's fine and valid, but to do it within minutes of repo creation gives the uneasy feeling of them "dancing a mace in the air" to remind people who's the big guys on the block.

So let's say I fork the project on GitHub, as others have done, and have not modified it. The APL permits redistribution of the source code, of course, so this is permitted.

Now, simply by clicking "Fork" -- and doing nothing else (i.e. modifying the source code), I am now violating their trademark? That's bullshit.

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