Spring tears down math t-shirt listing because it dared to mention 'zeta' | Hacker News Reader

Spring tears down math t-shirt listing because it dared to mention 'zeta'

theregister.com

165 pointsdredmorbius89 comments

Classic case of bureaucratic CYA.

> Here an element was flagged as part of this vetting process, resulting in temporary removal from the site. This listing has now been reinstated to our platform after the review proved to have no contentious elements."

> "They unblocked it but they also warned me future use of the word 'zeta' would again result in a ban," he explained

> Spring's spokesperson contradicted the explanation given to Rashid: "We can confirm that the user will not be banned for using this terminology on this occasion or for any future listing."

The tee shirt company was overzealous in enforcing trademark law. When they realized they made a mistake, they walked back some of their enforcement mechanisms, but kept a sanction on a user. Saying that if the user wrote four ASCII characters to trigger their same mistake again, he would be banned. Then their PR department lied to the media and said they never said that.

"As you are aware, Zeta is a letter of the Greek Alphabet. The Greek alphabet is currently protected legally by the Affinity Client Services. Due to this ownership and the takedowns we have received, we must police our platform for content using 'Zeta.'"

This is quite honestly the most ridiculous statement I've read this month.

The greek alphabet has existed since 800 BC, which is when Affinity Client Services invented it. Clearly their trademark has not expired yet

For all we know, the answer to the Homeric question is “Affinity Client Services, LLC”

Yeah. Honestly, the email from the legal team reads as if it was written by a human who couldn’t believe it either.

In next week's episode of Legal Zoo: lawyer creates a bunch of greek t-shirts and then hits t-shirt company with a discrimination lawsuit.

Dealt with the greek licensing nonsense back my in merch days.

It’s basically a patent troll, but for trademarks. They provide very little value and own the trademarks that essentially make the entire frat / sorority industry a thing. Beyond the trademark rent seeking they have three quarter million undergrads every year handing over thousands of their parents’ dollars to belong to the club, not including alumni who keep paying after they graduate.

It’s probably one of the worst entities for anyone to ever bother fighting in court so my guess is no one ever does.

Frats and sororities seek out Affinity to license their trademarks, it's not like Affinity really owns the Greek alphabet or something nefarious like that. In this case, Spring just misinterpreted the whole thing with their automated system. In your case, were you actually selling merch with other organizations trademarks on them? That kind of seems silly to me that you expected to do that without giving the org any value/money back.

Yeah this is what I was thinking as well. Frats and sororities typically have three greek letters to make up their names. So Affinity might be able to trademark a specific combination of three greek letters, but there is no way that a single greek letter on it's own stands as a trademark violation.

> Frats and sororities typically have three greek letters to make up their names.

(1) Two is also typical.

(2) The name of the organization is two or three letters in much the same way that the name of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is just four letters.

> Two is also typical.

Things are going to get spicy if we end up with more than 24 covid variants of concern.

Unless we start numbering them, which is what we should have done all along.

Greek letters double as numerals up to iota.

We already number them... with vectors. Delta is really B.1.617.2. The Greek names are a convenience for talking to a broader lay audience.

> The Greek names are a convenience for talking to a broader lay audience.

For some reason, for this virus, we moved away from naming the variants after the city it was first detected in. Most people can picture Hong Kong or California better than the Greek alphabet.

Flu names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3N2...

> For some reason, for this virus, we moved away from naming the variants after the city it was first detected in.

Based on your link, it's very unusual to name them after cities.

    Cities mentioned:
      Brisbane
      Perth

    States / provinces / territories:
      Hong Kong
      Fujian
      New Caledonia
      Shanghai
      California
      New York
      Jiangsu
      Wisconsin
      Hiroshima
      Ohio
      Florida
      Yamagata
      Massachusetts
      Texas
      Phuket
      South Australia
      Victoria

    Countries:
      Malaysia
      Solomon Islands
      Switzerland

How do you look at that list and think "it's usually the city"? It's the city in two out of four strains named for a location in Australia, and zero elsewhere.

(The names Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, Hiroshima, Yamagata and Phuket are ambiguous between a province and a city within that province. But the ambiguity is easily resolved by comparison to Fujian, Jiangsu, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, and Texas.)

I should have said geography and not cities, but point being it’s easier to work with geography terms than Greek letters (in sequence!) at an international level.

Though you run the risk of people using different names in their language for the same place, and not even being consistent about when they substitute local terms.

> Though you run the risk of people using different names in their language for the same place, and not even being consistent about when they substitute local terms.

I'd be amused if the Chinese literature translated delta as 丁 (fourth in a sequence of 10).

In my college years, all the Greek chapter at my school contracted their merch out from unlicensed local vendors. The shadier, the better. Blatant trademark infringement of the House of Mouse® for sorority recruitment week? You'd best believe it.

So this surely means I can go trademark the entirety of the English alphabet, then, right?

You could, for a very small subset of things. You can't trademark the letter A and then sue anyone that uses it. But you can trademark in a particular industry (assuming it isn't common use there) the same way "word"is trademarked in software...

"protected"

Reminds me of the movie Z. The movie is based on the Greek military coup and dictatorship of 1967-1974. In the movie (and maybe in real life) the junta banned the letter "Z" because it was used to signify "he lives" in reference to Grigoris Lambrakis, a leftist politician who was assassinated prior to the coup.

I wonder if ACS has sent them notices over single greek letters or if Spring got a lot for multi-letter strings (probably actually referencing fraternities/sororities) and decided to blanket block greek letter stuff to avoid the hassle.

Yeah "Zeta is a letter of the Greek alphabet" actually happens to be the main argument for its NOT being somebody's property.

I'm pretty sure Spring is a season, and thus mother nature owns the copyright on that and the tee shirt company should have to change their name or cease operations.

That's how this works, right? Ridiculous.

Mother Nature is not a legal person that can hold a trademark.

Oh yeah?

The selfish people who claim climate change isn’t happening due to humans just want to continue violating trademark.

Disney and Affinity Consultants are both currently looking into whether this is true or not.

New Zealand law does have a concept of a place or object having a legal personhood, for example Te Urewera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Urewera, and I'm not kidding, its literal meaning in English is The Burnt Penis).

I don't know if the US has such a concept though.

...aaaand, you just woke up a thousand US lawyers, who're now hitting the books.

But affinity can! So let’s create our own affinity and trademark spring.

Isn't there a tree that owns itself or something? So maybe?!

Maybe she should be. That'd definitely change the dynamics around e.g. pollution.

Yeah, Spring is also a Java framework. My heart goes out to any software devs at the company 'formerly known as Teespring' if they had to witness the name change.

Was expecting this to say that it was blocked due to it being a reference to Los Zetas. The reality was far more dumb.

However, I am now hoping Affinity Client Services sends a cease and desist to Los Zetas.

Came here to say this...

They don't have the cojones to do that.

That's the Spanish Zeta not the Greek Zeta!

Θα ήθελα να σας ενημερώσω ότι τα ελληνικά γράμματα είναι πνευματική ιδιοκτησία της Ελλάδας από το 800 πΧ.

Come at me, bro.

Who will Affinity Client Services be suing over the naming of the "Delta variant"?

Trademarks are limited to categories. For example, Delta airlines won't get sued by Delta fans, and the Delta variant can continue to infect people without being sued by any or these two.

But when it comes to Affinity, it is not completely baseless, a trademark troll and a coronavirus can both apply to the "plague" category.

> Trademarks are limited to categories.

Evidently Affinity and/or Spring believe otherwise.

He should refer them to Lexis-Nexus vs Toyota Lexus.

Moreover, this is a generic term in math as well as the greek alphabet.

It's like refusing to print the word, "Alphabet" because someone has it trademarked.

This makes it seem that Affinity is the prosecuting party, but it's actually just Spring being overly zealous. In fact, Spring are doing more enforcement than the supposed trademark-owning entity itself.

I can see protecting a readily-identifiable brand such as "Alpha Epsilon Pi" or "Phi Kappa Beta" in the context of how the apparel is being promoted, but to overly protect partial components in any context is basically lazy, overzealous enforcement.

> This makes it seem that Affinity is the prosecuting party,

It was pretty clear to me that Affinity wasn't. I thought the article was quite notable for NOT painting Affinity as the "bad" party.

Sure, the article does that, but not Spring themselves. Spring responds to the product creator that it's not their fault, it's Affinity's fault for trademark enforcement. But the reality is that it's not Affinity's enforcement that's the issue. So yes, the article does a good job of getting to the heart of it, but for everyone who can get the attention of the press for their cause, how many are stuck with Spring's nonsense answer and attempt to shift blame?

ok, sure. the referent for "This" in your parent comment is unclear. Thank you for clarifying, I agree with you!

I wonder if there is a safe harbor provision that could protect companies like Spring if they were to be less zealous.

RedBubble just today flagged a sticker I put up, which is art by me, of my fursona, whom I created and own the rights to.

Fortunately for me, according to the email, the "rightsholder decided it may remain for sale in the marketplace". The email doesn't even tell me who the supposed rightsholder is.

Supposedly things are "enrolled in the fan art partner program" based on the product tags... But these are only generic terms.

The listing in question: https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/blob-gulfie-puffin-by-gu...

This seems like a scaling problem for Spring. They've decided they need to automate checking for trademark infringement. But they're being overzealous and preventing their own sales. Isn't there a middle ground, where the automation flags a campaign as potentially infringing, and then before the campaign gets enough sales and goes to print, it gets human oversight to see if it was truly infringing?

Maybe we should ask Greece if they licenced their alphabet to a US company. BTW can I register the latin alphabet and sue the whole internet?

Catherine Zeta-Jones to receive a 'takedown' any minute now.

What chaos must result from Pi Day?

It's chaos enough that anyone thinks Pi Day is interesting.

1. Calendar dates are usually Big Endian, except in the US and a few other places.

2. 3.14 is not the value of pi in the decimal system. It is an approximation.

3. As it is, the updated Gregorian calendar is arbitrarily chosen.

4. The decimal system that gives significance to pi's approximate value is arbitrarily chosen.

Yes, I am a treat at parties.

6.28 You get to joke around about how many pi radians of pie you can eat.

Sounds like somebody doesn't Fucking Love Science!

2. Yes, but at some point in that day, the value will be exactly pi. And if you're a real geek about such things, you can at least get it down to one second. Yes, it will be at an instant within that second, but you could enjoy the whole second as the second that contained that instant.

Or, you know, you could enjoy the whole day...

‘Be exactly pi’ in what sense? is the point during the day when you’re .159265… of the way through 3/14 the relevant moment? Or is it at 1:59:26.5…?

But then, the 14th isn’t .14 of the way through March, and ‘months’ aren’t a consistent unit anyway so There’s no sense in which you can choose a moment in time ‘pi months’ into the year anyway.. so in what sense does ‘exactly pi’ occur during pi day at all?

It’s a very weird milestone to associate with pi, in general. The calendar is derived from a circle, after all, so pi can crop up in far more significant ways. Why not celebrate the moment when the earth has traveled 1 radian round the sun?

Wow, I never even thought of that. Associating pi with a place in the orbit, ideally one of the equinoxes, would actually make sense.

You could make a similar argument against any 'day'; birthdays included. I don't think anyone thinks it's 'interesting' or has any sort of actual connection with pi. It's just a silly day to.. 'celebrate' pi, like any other day for anything else.

> The decimal system that gives significance to pi's approximate value

In what way does the decimal system "give significance" to pi's approximation?

In base 12, for example, pi is 3.18480949. It would turn out to be a different date.

That just sounds like 4 extra reasons that it is indeed interesting.

Pi Day is a US thing. The rest of the world celebrates Pi Approximation Day on the 22nd July. And 22/7 is a better approximation than 3.14.

Pi isn't a value, it's a function.

Are you repeating something a high school math teacher told you, or are you engaging in some kind of mathematical platonism? Either way, you're going to need an argument.

I would assume that, if anyone owned the greek alphabet , it would be greeks

They sold it in the debt crisis. Times were tough.

(/kidding, because this is the internet).

What never works about these types of news stories is that they rarely find the person paying for this legal protection.

In the case of greek letters (particularly zeta..), these are fraternity and sorority organizations claiming three letter combinations as their copyright.

If you can come up with a reasonable next step for frats/sororities in the US protecting their brand/image while also not creating ridiculous stories like this, you're basically a policy wizard.

I agree that legal confusion is an issue usually with ancient trademark laws and people judging technology-related matters who still double click hyperlinks, but this is sort of hilariously dumb:

> "At Teespring (now Spring) we have rigorous technology in place to ensure any keywords monitored or contentious material featured is flagged and reviewed."

basically they have:

    if 'zeta' in blurb.lower():
       raise LegalIssue()

Fascinating.

I assume Affinity Client Services would also protest multiple letters, e.g. “lambda lambda lambda”, to keep control over sorority/fraternity names.

Is it actually legal to trademark a class of words in this way? Do they have legal right to prevent me from registering a student organization with a name that consists of three unique greek letters?

Not sure if this would apply in the US but it has happened elsewhere:

"It originally was designated as the "Porsche 901" (901 being its internal project number). A total of 82 cars were built as which were badged as 901s.[7] However, French automobile manufacturer Peugeot protested on the grounds that in France it had exclusive rights to car names formed by three numbers with a zero in the middle. Instead of selling the new model with a different name in France, Porsche changed the name to 911"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_911

This is Spring's "erring on the side of caution" trademark enforcement mechanism, not trademark law itself. I highly doubt that a court would acknowledge that Affinity has some trademark claim over all short strings of Greek letters.

> This is Spring’s “erring on the side of caution” trademark enforcement mechanism

Is it? Or is it a mechanism of preemptive enforcement put in place in response to past action by ACS or some generally applicable legal rule requiring preemptive presumptive enforcement of known trademarks on platforms, hence the reference to Spring’s “legal obligations to protect the assets of Affinity Client Services” in the letter from legal?

It's called a "chilling effect" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

I’m surprised ACS hasn’t sued Delta Airlines… unless they have already and Delta licensed their name.

Fun fact, when they use the NATO alphabet (which predates the airline…) they use Dixie instead to avoid confusion at Delta-heavy airports.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Good thing they're not using Greek letters for tropical storms any more.

They should sue the virus, maybe it will cease operations.

Delta Airlines should sue the virus.

> "The Clay Math Institute has a $100m prize for solving the Riemann Hypothesis."

I think this is a typo, the prize is $1 million. Is this some suffix I am unaware of?

Yeah, I'm sure they meant $1.00m (or $1,00m depending on locale). They just forgot the separator :).

This got me thinking. If they did bump it up from $1m to $100m, do we think the Riemann Hypothesis would be solved sooner?

the underlying story appears to be more subtle, and less exciting, than the register makes it sound.

But even more stupid.

> The Register spoke to a trademark coordinator at Affinity Consultants, who wished to be identified simply as Brett. He acknowledged that commerce platforms have problems policing trademarked material.

> "We work with Amazon too," Brett said. "They have been having difficulty with enforcement." He added that Affinity tries to educate companies about how to respond to trademark concerns, but cannot control how they do it.

yes, IIUC it's factually and legally correct that this company holds the trademarks and it's their responsibility to legally pursue what they consider to be violations (in this case it was not a violation, and the shirt company was clearly explaining they had an automated process which generated a false positive).

Everybody is outraged that the greek alphabet can be trademarked. If you have a problem with that, speak to your legislator instead of criticizing the companies exercising their legal rights.

I see Spring saying that using "zeta" in the future would result in content removal. I don't see the evidence of them saying the user would be banned. I think this issue is well out of proportion and doesn't warrant an article from El Reg.

Spring probably gets users uploading designs that contain trademark infringement all day long (imagine all the Disney properties people love to play with.), and they need an automated mechanism to deal with it. Affinity Client Services wants the Greek letters flagged so they can protect the brand of sororities and fraternities. I'm sure they registered their keywords with Spring because of people actually misusing their trademarks and if you don't police your trademarks, you can legally lose some of your trademark protection.

This design got reviewed and approved. Nothing to see here.

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