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Comment by molszanski | Hacker News Reader

What would you do if random corp would come and try to hijack your open source identity?

Did they actually try and hijack their identity? Hijack to me implies actively trying to steal their reputation. Sounds more like the name wasn't particularly unique and they independently decided they wanted to use that name.

it's more like this:

- They started as small firm in France, registered there the trademark Deepki, unrelated to software.

- I created Deepkit around 2018, trademarked in US and EU with software category.

- They raised substantial amount of money around 2022 $150M

- Board/Shareholders likely decided that the brand is important

- They tried to register the US brand under software category. The USPTO declined automatically because of "likelihood of confusion"

- They reached out to me wanting a "Consent and Coexistence Agreement", I told them not for free, to which they never responded with an offer.

- They tried to register in EU later, which I tried to block under the same "likelihood of confusion" ground.

- They started fighting with legal terms to get my brand deleted.

- They succeeded.

It's not necessarily only their fault that the trademark is gone now. As I just learned, the EU requires very strict rules of proving you have legit users. I couldn't convince them. Maybe due to skill issues, missing data, or technicalities. The biggest danger is now though that they can get me deleted from the internet entirely once the protection is gone. It requires just one corporation to decide to start come after you with a cancellation process, and you are done.

> They reached out to me wanting a "Consent and Coexistence Agreement", I told them not for free, to which they never responded with an offer.

Man, imagine if you had asked for a thousand euros as consideration.

So, you would spend several thousands of dollars to register a trademark to protect it from other corporations, and then the first thing you would do is give out the right to said corporation for 1000 bucks? I'm not an expert, but that sounds like a bad deal to me and substantially weakens the mark.

I'm clueless, how much did it cost to get the trademark registered?

> I'm not an expert, but that sounds like a bad deal to me and substantially weakens the mark.

Well, the alternative (in hindsight, admittedly) is losing it entirely?

You are telling us straight into our faces that you only valued the trademark for its ability to earn money from lawsuits.

Not just that, you will also have to solve the mystery of how a one time payment is supposed to strengthen your trademark in the long run.

> - They tried to register in EU later, which I tried to block under the same "likelihood of confusion" ground.

I might have misread - did they initially try and trademark "Deepki" or "Deepkit" when you attempted to block it?

Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable, and OP just experienced FAFO for trying to extort them.

> Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable

What kind of world do you live in?

It's no more reasonable for a product to trade under "Deepki" in the presence of the established mark "Deepkit" than it would be to name a school "Stamford University".

> presence of the established mark "Deepkit"

I think this is the key point, according to EU it is not

No, according to the EU there is no documentation that any of "hundreds of thousands" of users are located in the EU.

In neither case is it relevant to the idea that it is "reasonable" for Deepki to desire to use their mark in coexistence with the mark "Deepkit". Your argument is that they didn't want coexistence because the other mark didn't exist.

You mean like UConn Stamford?

Deepki was created in 2015. Deepkit was created in 2018.

Deepki is an ESG company that has nothing to do with Typescript server frameworks (i.e. Deepkit).

There's no confusion when searching the names, and there's no confusion when pronouncing them either - "Deepki" ends in a long ee sound while "Deepkit" uses the short i sound followed by a t.

No, initially they tried to trademark "Deepki" in the US. It was not me blocking that, the USPTO itself decided to block the application on the grounds of "likelihood of confusion" to which Deepki could have appealed, but they did not. I assume it's so blatantly similar, that even the USPTO clerk decided to block it right from the start.

I understand for the US trademark, I'm asking about the EU trademark. If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.

I'm not claiming their response is any better, but I don't know anything about trademark issuance in the EU so I won't speak on that.

> If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.

IANAL and dont really know, but my understanding is many places require you to defend it in order to keep it. If you become aware of something and fail to try and block it, that can be viewed as you've lost interest in the trademark and result in it being taken away from you.

> The biggest danger is now though that they can get me deleted from the internet entirely once the protection is gone.

You still have the US trademark, right? Unless the domain is .eu i dont see how that would happen.

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