Every answer in this thread is wrong except for "hire an attorney and work with them to figure out what the best option for you is." Do not follow any "free legal advice" from HN -- and I'm speaking as an actual licensed attorney.
Obviously, “hire a lawyer,” is sometimes right. But if I hired a lawyer every time I was told to, I would be out hundreds of hours of billing fees. Anecdotally, I’ve never fucked anything up royally. That doesn’t mean that I made the right decision, but is something I strive for.
Spending $300-1000 on a consult every time I might need one is like taking an antibiotic every time I might have encountered a bacteria. It’s important to qualify and spend money when I actually need to rather than every time.
It’s like those people who say “don’t criticize my book until you read it” (since that usually means that it makes them some money to have me buy their book). If I had to read every book to figure out if I should like it or not, that’s impossible. I need to develop effective evaluations and filters to prevent me from wasting my time and money.
The outcome here could be that OP loses their domain name. If they just want to give it up, they don't have to hire an attorney. Easy answer.
But if they do want to keep the domain name, when paid opposing counsel comes knocking at the door, they need to lawyer up, plain and simple.
I have received threaten letters before and have responded with "I dispute these claims. Please do not contact me again in any manner" and I never heard from them again.
I don't know enough about the company sending the threatening letter here, so I can't say if that would work or not here, but it is very possible you don't need a lawyer.
Indeed, but if you take no action at all, the opposing counsel does take action, and you don't contest the action, then the default outcome could be a forced transfer of the domain.
They are going to have a hard time finding a case that set a precedent that you can take over another company's website because you registered a similar company 5 years later. Lookup nissan.com
There's more to this issue than just the naked law and legal procedure. Context matters, and experienced lawyers help you navigate situations. They're called "counsel" for a reason. :-)
Actually I’ve been surprised to find that many times even high priced attorneys are usually willing to spend 20-30 minutes+ giving you some general advice before even retaining them. I’ve gotten very valuable advice this way several times at no cost.
There are scrupulous and unscrupulous lawyers, much as in any profession.
There are situations where this is very good legal advice. Collecting things you are owed from people who don't want to give them up takes time and money (and involves risk), and even when it nominally works the systems intended to make you whole for the additional costs don't always, and especially often don't value time (both delay and the consumption of your personal time) as much as you do.
A lawyer's job isn't just to advise you on what the law says you are entitled to, but more critically to do so on the course of action that will best achieve your interests given the pragmatics of the legal system.
Both of the times my wife and I have consulted an attorney, they provided an overview of the relevant legal and practical context, a description of options of how to approach it and what they could do as part of that and the fee structure involved, and a description of why hiring them would probably not be cost-effective for the issue at hand.
Have a home issue where the builder owes me $100k in an open-and-shut case… but there are a dozen other people in the same situation, his company has folded and he’s under indictment for fraud in an unrelated case. My lawyer advised me to just move on with my life as any chance of collecting is near-zero.
As another anecdote, my experience with developers is that developers will repeatedly tell you that the software isn't complete and requires extra attention to keep it running and to maintain it, and that it needs extra time for refactoring, despite it functioning correctly right now...
Is that not true in most cases? A running system will eventually become vulnerable to attacks, and/or services it relies on may be deprecated. The last thing you want is to be in a situation where your software is easily exploitable, but your dependencies are so far behind that a fix becomes a multi-month or year long project.
I got a semi-serious traffic ticket in Colorado in 2014, but I lived in California. I forgot about the ticket, and remembered a couple years later. I wanted to clear up the situation, but navigating the court system from a different state was challenging. I decided hiring an attorney local to the area would be easier than traveling to Colorado.
I called maybe 6 to 8 attorneys, and they fell into three categories: too expensive, too inexperienced, or just right.
Too expensive sounded like “we’ll need a $2000 retainer to even look at your case.”
Too inexperienced sounded like “I just graduated from law school, and I’ll give you a super good rate for the experience of working on your case.”
Just right sounded like “I know the district attorney who is overseeing your case. Their name is $NAME, and here’s exactly how I’m going to handle your case… <time passes> …I might be able to handle this for $500, but it could cost maybe double that if it’s more work than expected.”
I got the matter resolved for between 1X and 2X the minimum estimate, and was happy with the results.
One lawyer I hired to defend me in a contractual pay dispute said to me on the first meeting with both sides "Do not let this get to court. If this goes to court the only people that will win are me and the other lawyer. We'll both get to take an extra vacation this year." So, 1% of lawyers are not scum.
Luckily it didn't need to go to court. I walked into the meeting, let the other side play hardball, "We're not going to pay you any of the money we owe you, go fuck yourself." and then showed them in the contract they had signed where it says they don't own any of the copyright to any of the work I developed for them. They left the room and came back several minutes later with a cheque.
This is also the experience of a few friends I consult each time I weight "do I need a lawyer". So my experience is 100% the opposite of yours.
How many times have you used a lawyer for something and had your example happen? How many times have they not done what you claim? Care to share examples?
You're not necessarily wrong, but that's definitely a survivalship bias. You only need to lose once for a game over, so everyone still playing underestimates the stakes at play, as there is close to no interaction to people that have lost.
I’m not sure of a good way to balance out and correct for my bias other than just trying to think critically for when I need and don’t need a lawyer.
One type of error is paying a lawyer when you didn't need one, in which case, you're out $X.
The other type of error is not paying a lawyer when you did need one, in which case, you're out $Y.
In my experience, the values here are frequently $Y >>> $X.
In the end, the choice is yours; you rolls your dice and takes your chances.
So it doesn’t need to be expensive to request the support of a lawyer.
The "juridisch loket" is an organisation that provides free legal advice and is financed by the Dutch government. This is probably a better option in most cases.
With that said, this guy definitely needs to consult with a lawyer.
bruh consults are free, you're getting worked
For as long as people enjoy reading, writing and discussing, the only important thing is that readers can distinguish between "legal advice" and something some random person said on the internet.
It’s sort of like Google programming isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll get it to work, but you hopefully wouldn’t do it if you were building medical software that could end up killing people. That’s when you pay the experts.
The flip side to that is that it is illegal in most states to give legal advice to someone unless you are a lawyer. You can give legal information, but not advice.
[Illinois once tried to prosecute me for the crime, so I have some experience]
Sorry for the snarkiness, but I'm continuously gobsmacked by how oblivious people, especially attorneys, can be to the fact that the Game of Justice as it is played in these parts is simply not accessible to the vast majority of people, who can only try to find another way to work around the system even if it's probably doomed to failure.
[0] Dutch example: "Het Juridisch Loket"
Knowing your rights, reading the law and discussing it is a perfectly fine thing to do for everybody.
Sure. I am a former law student (in mid career when I did that), worked in legislative office, spent a large part of my career as a government program analyst that did lots of legal/compliance analysis, and spend huge amounts of reading and discussing the law, legal rights, etc.
But when people have an immediate concrete legal problem with substantial property or other interests at stake, whatever other discussion of my understanding of the involved law involved might be interesting, the only correct advice in ~99.997% [0] of circumstances from anyone who is not a lawyer, or even just not the person involved’s lawyer on the matter, is to get someone who is your lawyer (at least for the length of a consultation) review and advise.
[0] there are situations where the practical context is such that the law and legal advice are irrelevant, though they are quite exceptional.
Is it wrong to try to be informed of the law (when ignorance is rarely an excuse)? To find out what rights a trademark or a domain name confer? Or to list precedent and examples, such as nissan.com? We should just stick our heads in the sand, resign ourselves to total ignorance and helplessness, and let the lawyers do all the thinking?
Lets make this specific. Look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29522196
Are you saying every part of that comment, except for "This is probably not DIY territory; consult a lawyer knowledgable about trademark law to help you determine how to respond." is wrong?
For example, is the following statement wrong in the U.S.?
> Just like patents have a concept of "prior art," trademarks have a concept of "first use in commerce."
Speaking as a former law student that left because I got back into technology, and who is a fairly educated layman on the law but not someone with any financial interest in how people approach legal services, this.
Take the letter. Delete it. Engaging is the fastest way to lose the domain. Their Lawyers want you to engage and start making written statements. Don't.
"Seems like an excellent way to lose your domain in a default judgement"
Lol. Don't ignore legal paperwork or court dates, which this isn't.
There's more to this issue than just the naked law and legal procedure. Context matters, and experienced lawyers help you navigate situations. They're called "counsel" for a reason. :-)
Obviously they have the OP's address, so if they fail to serve him the judgement should be easy enough to set aside.
I'd do absolutely nothing in this circumstance until and unless they actually initiate a legal proceeding. If they did sue for the domain, depending on the value of brand I probably lawyer up, and perhaps seriously consider counter-suing them for both their domain and the use of the business name itself.
1) This is an ex co-worker . I believe she's well versed in such things. I get nothing for this mention.
2) That said, one of the keys to trademark is being in the same industry, such that the public might get confused.
Apple Computer striking a deal with Apple Records, once the former started to sell music, is a good example. Prior to that, there was no (legal or market) overlap of the two.
John Lennon himself described it as: "we've got this thing called 'Apple' which is going to be records, films, and electronics – which all tie up."
Note that this is generally true for trademark law, but there are things like the ICANN/WIPO UDRP that can be used to expropriate domain names that have somewhat of a different standard.
and so the racket continues
Not that their advice is wrong - you should consult a lawyer over internet advice. But the "everyone else is wrong, listen to me" flavor is a bit heavy-handed.
Legal questions come up on HN from time to time and the usual response is a bunch of wannabe lawyers incorrecting one another, and if OP follows any of their advice, Bad Things could result. I spoke up early this time in what was perhaps a foolish attempt to short-circuit this.
No competent attorney is going to give legal advice here -- money aside -- because they would be violating their professional ethics code by doing so. Giving legal advice requires knowing facts at a very detailed level (the degree to which is rarely found in the post), knowing the laws in the jurisdiction(s), and having relationships and experience. Not to mention attorney-client confidentiality, and other reasons.
This isn't someone trying to rope someone into a racket for their own gain, it's "Our laws and legal system are a clusterfuck that varies wildly from region to region. Get a free (or at least cheap) consult instead of taking a risk trying to navigate this yourself".
There is no situation in which it is worthwhile to take the risk to try and navigate that clusterfuck yourself. Spend the 50USD or so and the hour of your time it'll cost at most to get a consult and go from there. At best you can get something out of this whole interaction but at worst if you don't consult a lawyer you can end up without the domain, without any money from selling the domain, and saddled with legal fees defending a lawsuit against you.
No reason to tip your hand until a lawyer tells you to. For instance, the last time I dealt with a lawyer, they had me send responses directly, in hopes the other side would underestimate our position. It worked, fwiw.
Millions of Americans don't have e-mail. They're just on social media. What then?
That's why important things are always sent by mail. Very important things by certified mail.
If an email address can't be found, the correspondence can be delivered through other means if necessary (mail, process server, etc.). But generally, there has no longer been a need to waste paper and postage to deliver notices since email became practically ubiquitous.
Having, or publishing, an email address does not mean I care to, choose to, or will in fact receive email sent by you; or that I will display or treat it in the fashion you desire.