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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

Also, why would a “non-profit” need to trademark it?

Non profit is a business structure not a designation meaning “no business acumen.” Many non profits are actually quite profitable and active businesses, but they have no beneficial owners, pay no dividends, etc, and often have some mission that’s in some way broadly beneficial. This exempts them from certain taxation and other benefits. But it absolutely doesn’t mean everything they do is done altruistically without material consideration and definitely doesn’t mean with no legal claims or recourse for protecting their works or identities.

Plus they still get to pay huge salaries.

Maybe because they need expensive skills

I'm sure the highly paid charity execs would say so. Trouble is, the charity space often suffers from a broken market feedback mechanism, where the people paying for the product are not the people consuming the product, and this can lead to a business structure that looks like a pure-play marketing machine hooked up to exec pockets with occasional leakage into a small amount of actual charity work.

"But the situation occurs in regular business too! Monopolies, oligopolies, etc happen when the market feedback mechanism breaks!"

Yeah, and we should go after those too. It's really astonishing the lengths to which people go to defend bad behavior.

Non profit doesn’t necessarily mean charity.

For instance, the life line company (“help me I’ve fallen and can’t get up”) is (or was) organized as a non profit. They sold devices and services at a decent margin. Their excess revenues went back to employees in wages and perks. Executives and founders especially enjoyed extravagant life styles.

I was going to say both Visa and Mastercard are non profit but apparently this changed in 2006.

I guess it makes sense like a "Got Milk?", or "the other white meat" for banks.

Like the charity Wikimedia, that needs 6-figures salaries to coordinate volunteers filling webpages.

Nobody with skills would be happy to be the one that represents Wikimedia for less than 780'000 USD right ?

Most people with the organizational skills to operate a complex enterprise demands a pretty significant compensation package. Even if you found someone to do it for considerably less once they’ve proven effective they would become highly sought after in the labor market and would be poached away leading to churn and turnover in roles that really benefit from stability over time. While it is likely there is someone who doesn’t mind living a life of austerity when capable securing of a much more comfortable lifestyle for them and their family, it can be really hard to find them and require a lot of churn in mishiring the talent and losing skilled talent due to inflicting non market bearing penury on them and their loved ones out of some weird morality not supported by the surrounding culture and society.

> Most people with the organizational skills to operate a complex enterprise demands a pretty significant compensation package

That is mainly USA, such people are pretty cheap in the rest of the world.

I have a friend who with their CPA got a job at a non profit and they were worried they would pigeon hole into a specific industry and the concept of non profit worried them about their career. My advice to them was non profit does not mean “not profitable to you.” Depending on the non profit salaries can be greatly outsized and often perks are outstanding. All that excess cash goes somewhere and some non profits enjoy enormous margins and lucrative markets, but the accounting and related rules are specialized.

To their execs. It’s basically a meme in non-profit world how poorly everyone outside the C-suite gets paid and how the non-profit “mission” is weaponized against workers in salary negotiations.

Many do so in order to maintain their integrity and reputation. For example, the name Wikipedia and the Wikipedia logo are registered trademarks.

In the case of fundrising and sponsorship, it assures to sponsors the legitimity of that campaign, because there is no conflict with other organisation or company using the same name.

I could go on, but I hope you get the point.

So other people can't pretend to be them or their products and do things like raise funds. Which is also the point of "for profit" trademarks

To prevent for profit companies from using it. The Olympic Rings and the Red Cross's Red Cross logo are both trademarked.

Non-profits seek trademarks for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with profit.

And, non-profits doesn't mean they don't do things that they profit from, it just means they aren't trying to achieve profits for their owners. Endowments are non-profits, but they most certainly are making investments to achieve profits for the purpose of pushing that money into charitable vehicles.

A non-profit may also want to prevent others from profiting from their work by using their trademarks without approval for private gain.

Having a trademark just means you are protecting a name, not that you are seeking to extract value, per se.

For the same reason Wikipedia needs a trademark, or any successful open source project. To prevent grifters from hitching a ride off your word and muddying the water / confusing users of your service or product

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