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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I just can’t understand the point of the DMCA takedown here. This software is very dead and abandoned at this point, and the only thing bearing its name is vaporware that appears to be so distant from the original as to effectively not even compete with it.

Of course, the copyright holders have every legal right to do so. But doesn’t it seem pointless? This codebase probably has more historical interest than commercial by now. Am I missing something?

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It's very likely about the brand and trademarks. The WinAmp software is dead, but the brand is alive and there is a company trying to build something under it.

Brand loyalty/trust is gone and companies wonder why... (Slight tangent; I believe Mozilla are tarnishing the Firefox name this way as well with firefox branded this and that.)

How do we know the DMCA takedown even came from the rightsholder? It's trivial to pretend to own something, and companies aren't really obligated to verify the authenticity of takedown requests.

Well, it’s impossible to be 100% certain, but the claim itself was posted publicly.

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/07/2021-07-0...

Seems pretty pointless to me, too.

I'll make the assumption that the founders have zero financial interest in Winamp. What's the point of exerting IP rights if you have nothing to gain financially... is it pride? A latent desire to stagnate innovation? Making other peoples' lives harder because yours was too? Who knows?

I believe that this is a new version of Winamp, there have been some talks about a relaunch https://www.extremetech.com/computing/329258-winamp-prepares...

Considering there are some references to cloud https://web.archive.org/web/20210418220750/https://github.co... I'm going to go ahead and guess that it's new.

Not a lawyer but I guess it relates to a possibility of a loss of a trademark by failure to police.

DMCA is a copyright claim, not trademark. Also, the idea that a single instance of failing to enforce a mark would constitute trademark abandonment is disputed[1]. It certainly seems far-fetched given the general bias laws have towards the rights of corporations, not to mention extremely convenient for legal teams.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

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