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Comment by schappim | Hacker News Reader

We got sued in Australia by an American company for using a open-source PCB https://github.com/sparkfun/MaKeyMaKey .

The claims were under trade mark infringement (note SparkFun didn't sue us) and the PCB layout as "deceptively similar".

Thankfully we got our money back on insurance.

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The design could be open-sourced while at the same time it could reference trade marks which are the exclusive mark of a particular company.

A classic example of this is CentOS and RHEL. You can fork RHEL all you want, but you cannot put "Red Hat" on your fork.

We were surprised as both the entity that registered the trade marks, and the trade marks themselves were created years after the designs were first open sourced.

Insurance is a tax on everyone, and probably a tax on you specifically.

Even assuming that insurance companies act as naive rationalists believe they do, losses are socialized. In actual fact, insurance companies are able to price discriminate against policy holders likely to cost more than the average cost in the future, especially if likelihood of future losses are as public as court proceedings.

We didn't know that we had insurance that covered this until after the court case. It was a nice surprise.

And they still paid? Thats great, usually the few I've seen say you have to talk to them before legal proceedings otherwise too bad. Could I ask if you had the details of the policy? Who offered it, the name etc? I might be in the market for some soon. tia

Yup, the insurer paid up. I can't go into details, however, in Australia the judge will quite often (and rightly so) send you to mediation beforehand. The ultimate underwriter was Lloyds of London.

Lloyd's of London is a marketplace, not an underwriter.

https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds

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