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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Watch out for trademarks. Your slogan “The power of WebFlow for your React app” is going to attract attention from Webflow’s legal department if your project is successful.

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Agreed. I was worried that it's derivative while trying to communicate what we do succinctly. I know Supabase does the same thing with Firebase but our wording might be more problematic.

Honestly I would change that wording immediately. Even being pretty savvy with this stuff, I thought this was an open-sourced webflow when I skimmed it and I assure you, if they even vaguely consider this a future threat to any of their business at all, their counsel will use it as a legal cudgel to bludgeon you.

I agree "the power of webflow" implies a connection. "inspired by webflow" would be probably better, but even there I am not sure if it is safe enough.

Absolutely. If I came out with a project that said "Get the power of Oracle with a simple javascript API" people would think I had a new Oracle API for javascript, not that I had a JS-friendly database I thought was as good as Oracle. But before I even mentioned webflow at all, I'd first want to make sure they didn't have any related patents I'd be bumping up against without being able to clearly show prior art. Only after that might I consider saying "webflow-style workflow" or something along those lines. It's sad, but you have to assume their lawyers will use every legal tool at their disposal to protect their client's bottom line whether its reasonable or not.

Point taken, we'd do better without the headache for now until further legal counseling. Changing the tagline now. Thank you all for the suggestion!

Best of luck! Great project.

I'm not a lawyer, but here's some high-level general suggestions from a specialist which could be helpful:

https://www.cohnlg.com/the-nuances-of-trademark-use-in-adver...

It looks like you've got a really nice product idea here! And Webflow has raised hundreds of millions, so they have a war chest for this kind of thing. I just don't want to see you run over later.

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