And he did offer them a solution: $30,000 dollars, to which they promptly - albeit indirectly - replied with fuck you.
We must pursue our trademarks or risk losing them. We must. So can we make this amicable instead of hostile?
The maintainer could have requested things like "Okay can I make some blog posts and you help me with some SEO to make sure people are aware of the changes to my project name?" etc. Sounds like Kik was willing to be reasonable and help where they could. Clearly they could have gone in with an opening statement saying "this is the lawyer, I am sending trademark takedown notices, fuck you, go to hell" but they clearly did not.
This is one person trying to make the best of an awkward situation, and one person just saying "duces".
> Using another's trademark in a way that has nothing to do with the product or service for which the trademark was granted is not a trademark policy violation.
Many people think that if you have a trademark, you have to sue everyone who uses your name no matter what capacity they're using it in, which doesn't seem to be the case. If their usage is unrelated to yours, you have no authority to prevent them from using it however they want.
There are some exceptions to this, like the American Red Cross's logo of a red cross on a white background (nobody is allowed to use this except the red cross in any context, although it isn't always enforced) [1].
[0]: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...
[1]: https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2012/04/one-cr...
And that's where it definitely stops, but people get carried away and imagine now if Alice tells Bob, "Enough, I need you to stop doing X by this reasonable time" and Bob says "Fuck you Alice" and keeps doing X the court will rule for Bob. Nope. And they imagine Bob's friend Charlie might show up too, and do X and Alice has to accept that because she told Bob previously it was fine, again Nope. As a result some businesses become convinced that unless they pay lawyers to threaten every hobby project starting with the same first letter as their product the terrible "estoppel" will destroy their business.
Also just as a general principle lawyers are for avoiding disputes first, fixing existing disputes as a last resort. If you're actively paying lawyers to start shit you are probably Doing It Wrong™.
If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.
But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.
Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).
Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.
Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole.
So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it.
No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.
Is this a legal requirement?
The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place.
Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.
The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky.
> Maybe my English wasn't clear.
What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?
No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.
Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.
> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]
> Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead.
You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.
——
The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.”
If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.
How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?
> and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.
They aren't threatening him for the fun of it, this is classic trademark stuff.
Also the "solution" he offered them was:
> Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks
Would _you_ give this guy $30,000, after he calls you a dick multiple times and tells you in no uncertain terms to fuck off?
No one comes out looking good in this interaction, don't get me wrong, but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions. He gets no sympathy from me.
It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced.
Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails.
[0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...
And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.
Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t show emotions and suck up the abuse”. I’m glad he was both showing his protest and standing up to the overreach.
Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.
There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.
I’d say they made a logical decision.
In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.
If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.
And as an attorney, if I go back into practice someday, of course I’ll do the same.