Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

If Discord was allowing this website to run for so long using this brand, don't they risk losing the trademark because of the dilution due to non-enforcement ?

View on HN

Correct. if you don't defend your trademark then you risk losing it.

This is generally not nearly as true as people think.

At least according to the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

> The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide occurs when a trademark becomes the standard term for a type of good (‘zipper’ and ‘escalator’ being two famous examples). This is very rare and would not be a problem for Canonical unless people start saying “Ubuntu” simply to mean “operating system.” Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.

Why what? Is it real? So is it why Apple and other attack everybody then?

Just to confirm, they have a trademark: https://trademarks.justia.com/866/35/discord-86635386.html

They don’t seem to mention it on their website. I don’t see any guideline for how to respect their trademark: https://discord.com/branding

Now the question, does it risk dilution if a company doesn’t say what’s allowed.

Yes. Trademark law says the use of a trademark as a trademark is an issue. Using the discord logo to link to a discord channel is fine. Allowing a site to be named Discord with a different TLD is using a trademark as a trademark and that can have consequences. The whole point of trademark is to distinguish goods/services and by failing to prevent the use of discord.io they kinda dropping the ball here in my opinion.

Does the fact that .io is a ccTLD (despite not actually being used primarily for internal BIOT purposes) offer any counterpoint to that argument?

No, it’s still trademark infringement. Especially since it relates to the same product. It would be different if they were unrelated but this is about as bad as infringement and brand confusion can get. Any competent legal OR marketing team would have sent them a C&D ages ago.

> Any competent legal OR marketing team would have sent them a C&D ages ago.

Interesting. That about sums up my opinion of their development team.

Using discord as a TLD would not be automatic trademark infringement. You can't just get an all-encompassing trademark for english words.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com