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Comment by mnd999 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a pretty straightforward trademark dispute.

You can advertise on other peoples' trademarks, as long as you don't misrepresent your software as being 'official' or otherwise confuse users via your ad. The ad in the screenshot says "Best alternative to Kdenlive" so I doubt anyone's going to think Filmora is an official product of KDE/Kdenlive.

Odd choice of words. To me 'best alternative to' implies the target audience is people who can't choose kdenlive for some reason. But something which is both libre and free of charge has few barriers to adoption.

well, why would you pit a paid software against a free one. obviously it is free so they are giving it away because it must be a crap software. no way. /s

I just checked for instance in France it's not that simple:

"Care must be taken to ensure that advertising :

  - Is not misleading or likely to mislead,
  - Relates to goods or services of the same nature, meeting the same needs or having the same objective,
  - objectively compares one or more essential, relevant, verifiable and representative characteristics of these goods or services, such as price.
"

How?

Kdenlive is their trademark, competitors are using it to sell their products.

In marketing, you can include competitor brand names in your keywords. The tactic is referred to as "conquesting".

Yes. In general people avoid giving any attention to their competitors, so marketers typically say “50% better than the most popular toothpaste” (if you’re an underdog) or “the #1 product, used by twice as many people as the competition”.

But that’s a convention. You can absolutely use competitors trademarks as long as it doesn’t create confusion. The Pepsi Challenge is a famous example. Microsoft’s lame “I’m a Mac” ads are another.

> Microsoft’s lame “I’m a Mac” ads are another.

I think you'll find those were Apple's lame ads.

I think you’ll find Microsoft made even lamer ads as an attempted response, though I did misremember and they were “I’m a PC”: https://velocitypartners.com/blog/microsofts-baffling-im-a-p...

I think Apple's original message was something along the lines of, "You can't get malware on a Mac", but the subtext would have been, "Only because we have so little market share that the scammers wouldn't waste their time developing it."

Eh, I don’t think that was the message. And at the time Macs were far far more malware-resistant than Windows. There are better complaints about Apple.

> Macs were far far more malware-resistant than Windows

In what ways? I work in the field, so feel free to speak technically.

If people actually wrote viruses for Macs they would have ran just like Windows. The expense and rarity of Macs at the time in hands of people that wanted to write programs drastically reduced the number of attacks.

Trademark isn't being used; you'll notice the ads don't contain any reference to Kdenlive.

The first image in the linked Reddit post literally says "Best alternative to Kdenlive", though.

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