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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

The guy made a very valid point:

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".

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“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.”

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.

This is it, really.

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.

> Trademarks require intent to mislead

Is this a legal requirement?

I meant trademark violations. My bad. I edited the post and added the missing word.

As someone else mentioned, your correction is also incorrect. One can violate trademark unintentionally.

No, my correction is fine. It helps if you read the sentence in its entirety rather than stop reading at the comma... you know... where I specifically go on to say "or" followed with a whole bit on how it can be violated unintentionally and give an example of such.

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.

Your correction is not fine. English is my first language, and I am telling you that the way you wrote the sentence makes it incorrect. It's probably your grammar more than your misunderstanding of the facts. Another commenter said the same.

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?

> Trademark violations require intent to mislead

No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.

Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.

If you see the second half of that sentence, with an example of how...

> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]

We see the second half. Your sentence reduces to:

> 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.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve by leaving multiple successive comments threads about the same topic. I will reply to this message and will withdraw after this.

——

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.

We don't need you to respond. You have made it clear that there is nothing anyone can ever say or do to convince you that you are wrong.

Another expression of your stereotype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23360585

> Neither of these things have occurred

How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?

This trademark thing must be the next biggest popular HN misunderstanding after the whole "act in the shareholders interest" debacle.

Could you explain the trademark misunderstanding in a bit more detail?

According to GitHub [0]:

> 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...

Also people get carried away with how estoppel works. Estoppel is a basic principle in civil law that says if Alice tells Bob it's fine for him to do X, then even if Bob is infringing on Alice's lawful rights by doing X, she doesn't get to come back later and tell a court "Hey, Bob was infringing my rights by doing X".

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™.

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