Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Oh hi! I'm the creator of this.

Slack doesn't deserve any hate here... also, it happened in 2018!

I created this manyyyy years ago, since finding/uploading new emojis was so clunky. It's so weird to see it here now. This whole thing happened in 2018, so this isn't new. They just wanted me to change the name (fair enough!). I always meant to redo it with their new emoji API (so it didn't need a Chrome extension) and rename it; I just never got around to it.

Plus, their emoji support got better (they used to reject large emojis rather than resize, didn't have newer emojis, they didn't have an API for adding emojis, etc), so a lot of the features became much less important :)

The email from their lawyer had a bunch of scary legalese, but here's the friendly part from him:

"Please understand that we are not interested in squelching creativity or stopping people from encouraging the use of our platform. However, our name and our brand are very important symbols of trust for our customers and we need to make sure that trust is not violated, even inadvertently, by non-Slack products."

I'm a huge Slack fan (hence why I built this) and built this to fix a need I had, but it's their brand and I don't blame them at all!

Every company should behave this way. At least in the US, trademark requires active enforcement to not become generic and useless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_gen...

Copyright doesn't work the same way. You can selectively enforce it, at your discretion, without risking loss of the copyright.

For a trademark like this, one way that Slack can "enforce" their trademark is for slackmoji to acknowledge Slack's trademark in slackmoji's webpages.

Oh man... sometimes I wonder how the HN anger machine manages to find new things to be outraged about.

A testament that emotions sell: anger, sadness and outrage are heavily upvoted even for things that happened way back.

I mean, GP was kind, the lawyer was kind. the language of "cease and desist" sounds strong and is strong, but is a requirement for protect of trademark or whatever.

in this case it's no harm no foul really, or at least maybe not much.

the kernel of truth is there though, this kind of stuff happens a lot, usually from big corps to little guys doing virtually no damage. in some cases really quite damaging, I don't know if any of you remember the Backcountry (outdoor gear retailer) saga from a few years ago. almost all of my friends still refuse to purchase from them because of their legal departments overzealous protection of an extremely common word "backcountry"

I like how Atlassian allows you to use their product names in your own as long as you structure it like ‘[my product] for [atlassian product]’

I kinda find it hard to not use the product name if it’s something specifically made for that product e.g. slackmoji

For me, “Emoji for Slack” sounds like an add-in, but “Slackmoji” sounds like something Slack made themselves. Probably because of the “for” separating word.

Their emoji support is not that good, they lack the latest melting[1] and saluting[2] emojis. I particularly miss the saluting face at work.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/melting-face/

[2] https://emojipedia.org/saluting-face/

Those were added last year in Unicode 14. Slack probably just hasn't updated to the new standard.

When I first read this, I thought "melting face" was a reference to the famous climactic scene from the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where the Nazi goon's face melts down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcR9k8o4I0w

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