Magic Login Is Dead | Hacker News Reader

Magic Login Is Dead

magiclogin.net

45 pointsdebdut27 comments

People who invested in the insane attempt to trademark-troll the term "magic link," which drove this person out of business:

* Tiger Global

* Northzone

* Lightspeed Ventures

* SV Angel

* Social Capital

* Balaji Srinivasan

* Ryan Hoover

* Alexis Ohanian

* Naval Ravikant

Just remember, these are supposed to be sophisticated investors who have technical skills and do due diligence... And you're supposed to see their names on a deal and go, "oh, well, if they invested, there must be something of value here!" Yeah, no. They are literally shareholders in an attempt to trademark-troll into taking ownership over a very basic form of user authentication. So pathetic.

> And you're supposed to see their names on a deal and go, "oh, well, if they invested, there must be something of value here!"

I think that ship sailed a long time ago, nowadays it seems like many investors invest based on the ability to hype other investors which becomes self-perpetuating. I wasn't surprised to see that https://magic.link/ says it's "Blockchain native".

Investors invest in things that make money. If trademark trolling is profitable, they will invest in it. What's surprising?

The complete lack of ethics in the investment community?

I do not disagree with you, but nothing about humans favors ethics. Human nature, sadly, favors "F-U, I got mine", and when it comes to money, it's even worse.

I don't think human nature favours that, because we were originally tribal, and we possess the capacity for empathy. I think capitalism promotes sociopathy.

I think it's also a case of "if you're not going to do that, someone else will and eat your lunch". I wonder how much things would be different if far fewer companies publicly traded their stock.

that's part of it though; it's not like engaging in business just makes you greedy (though obviously it does draw greedy/sociopathic people), it's that the mechanisms of capitalism specifically encourage you to be ruthless, either to maximise profits or stave off competition.

They didn't come up with the idea either; it's like the "new" iFart app.

The author https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=protoduction wrote this:

Half a year back or so I built a mini SaaS product that failed, now I'm in the process of open sourcing it so that everybody can freely host it for themselves. Here's the project homepage https://magiclogin.net, it was/is transactional e-mails and e-mail authentication as a service. Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself. I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..

I urge the founder to reconsider. A strongly worded letter is common and is usually far more bark than bite.

Has the OP considered consulting with a lawyer? I'm sure there are better alternatives than shutting the whole thing down.

Given that it's not a commercial product anyway at this point, the plan is to open source the project in its entirety.

If it catches on, and there seems to be a demand for a managed version of it, then I (or someone else) can pick it up again under a different name.

I'd do the same OP is. Lawyers are expensive.

Why not just change it to "login link" or some alternative branding instead?

Big companies such as Auth0 are no shy about using "magic link" and don't care. It's an industry term, and not all registered trademarks are legit and unconditional, and all those trolls want is to lose "their" trademark, obviously!

> We never charged anybody or collected payment details for our service.

Browses to pricing tab ...

Fair, low pricing

No dark patterns here, you simply pay for what you use with a lower limit. And still it's cheaper than the competition.

I didn't want to have any free tier (for now), but also it wasn't worth my time to actually implement payments until I had enough users - a point it didn't reach.

So every user was in a trial that never expired, despite what it said on the frontpage.

Perfectly reasonable, but it is advertised as a commercial service.

I echo the others that suggest a rebrand and resume trading as usual.

That's a neat idea. Couldn't they just rename the service? Seems like they've been waiting for an opportunity to pull the plug. Or maybe I'm misreading it.

Probably. Our company received a similar letter from Adobe 15 years ago, we simply changed the name and still in business without a problem.

Noticed this type of login on a site I use: A one time password send directly to email. Still deciding if I like it or not...

It can be so damn annoying on android, When you mail client opens its own browser instead of the default. You close the screen to do something else comeback and have to login again.

IIRC one can register a protocol handler so that the browser that you opened the site in will be the handler for the link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/r...

Haven't tried it myself though

I've built a similar system which sends the token for copying and a link for clicking. It also uses SMS if the user provides their phone number.

Yeah, pretty annoying when you want to access a site on your iPad without any mail client configured. I ended up needing to use airdrop to send the login link to the iPad. Totally not user friendly in my case.

tRaDeMaRkS eNcOuRaGe iNnOvAtIoN

You know, it’s a two sided coin. It protects you from, companies like Amazon or Google ripping your business names and launching their own versions. Also it helps companies like Disney to sue people who used their spiderman logo, to print a birthday poster. May be innovators should innovate their product name to start with.

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