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Comment by crumpled | Hacker News Reader

A trademark violation is a copyright violation, because a trademark is copyrighted at first inception, before anyone adds the '™'. A company is also compelled to take actions like this to maintain the rights to thier own trademarks. That's my understanding; IANAL.

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No, it’s not. Copyright and trademarks are two completely different things with different rules that apply to them.

There's no need to downvote me, as I'm only engaging in polite conversation, just explain it. And if you can support your argument with qualifications, that would be nice.

It sounds like people are saying that a company can have their trademarks used by downstream distributors of AGPLv3 software, if the license doesn't explicitly prevent that, which just seems wrong. The codebase license is not a license to other company IP

I also don't understand why an entity couldn't do a DCMA takedown based on a trademark violation.

You can't (legally) do a DMCA takedown for a trademark violation. You can use a copyright license that requires a user of a copyrighted work to respect your trademark (or whatever, basically). Then if someone doesn't meet those terms, the copyright license is revoked, and they are in violation of copyright law. However, this is legally just a DMCA takedown for a copyright violation.

That's not the case.

And if it were, it still wouldn't matter because the AGPLv3 source would have granted you a license to that too being a copyright license.

AGPLv3 allows one to add trademark terms that, when violated, revoke the copyright license.

Link to where Signal added these terms? You've posted a variant of this claim several times on this post but as far as I can see Signal-Desktop is licensed under a pure AGPLv3 which definitely does not have such terms.

This is not correct. The trademark doesn't affect the copyright but you need both in order to publish binaries with the original name and logo in a store.

You need a copyright license to use the binary. You need a trademark license to use the trademark. See the firefox -> iceweasel kerfuffle

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