Hacker News Reader

Comment by localhost3000 | Hacker News Reader

Used to periodically get a c&d email from FB lawyers for some harmless software I published. Always completely ignored it, not even responding to acknowledge receipt. It eventually stopped. I figure they gave up and focused their efforts on targets who showed they would be responsive to threats. It was 100% bullying.

View on HN

Even acknowledging receipt gives them a lot of power.

Remember that they probably have a list of hundreds or thousands of C&D's to send, and if you don't respond they would probably need to file a john doe lawsuit to get your identity from your ISP, and it's unlikely that all that effort is worth it to them.

It would be funny if legal teams at huge companies have OKRs and evaluations. “You hit your target of 250 C&Ds this quarter great work”. Justifying your paycheck is scarier when thinking about the legal dept.

Do you know they don't? Otherwise I would assume they have dumb incentives like that. In my previous company the legal team measured the number of "takedowns" of countefeit merch etc. as a key number. I assume this helped to hurt their effort to prevent counterfeit in the first place.

Legal absolutely has OKRs.... usually around management of a hypothetical legal liability and how much they reduced it by when it came to actual payouts or vice versa

Similar back when apps on profiles were a thing. Apparently doing things like creating a scoreboard for pokes was against the terms.

super useful to know - could I interview you about this to add to the guide? you can find contact details on my personal site louis.work

It is worth pointing out that FB has a long history of litigating this issue, from Power Ventures, to BrandTotal, to Octoparse, to Voyager Labs and more. And they have about 80-90% track record of success. Obviously, they send C&Ds more often than they file litigation. But to act as if this is a completely idle threat is naive.

Good ole Perkins Coie.

Was it trademark related?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com