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Comment by karel-3d | Hacker News Reader

They now have GoFundMe where they are soliciting donations for a discovery phase of a <strike>patent</strike> trademark cancellation request.

They have just 50k USD out of 200k USD they are raising. (No idea if that's appropriate; from the outside, it seems like a lot of money, but also they are fighting Oracle which has unlimited money, so, yeah)

For some reason it's not linked in the page itself.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-challenge-oracles-javascr...

https://deno.com/blog/javascript-tm-gofundme

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Not to nit-pic, but it's a Trademark cancellation - not a patent. The confusion probably came from the fact it's before the US Patent and Trademark Office.

to nitpick, short of holding evidence of a literal internal memoradum stating it, $100,000 or $100,000,000,000 won't be able to prove that a company has no intention to resume the use of a trademark at some point. the entire affair is pointless fantasy

Wouldn't Oracle's use of the Java trademark be problematic in a trademark cancellation request? We're talking about two very similar names for identical product types (i.e. programming languages). Indeed the similarity was originally intended to imply an association. I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle's sole interest in the trademark is due to its similarity and history.

Oracle's sole interest is extracting money from its assets through whatever tactics are most effective, regardless of technical merit (not specific to JavaScript I guess though)

I think this is accurate. No way for them to give up JavaScript and not risk giving up Java.

Someone should patent <blink>.

Side question: can the CEO or sole proprietor of a corporation/small business/ nonprofit litigate pro se on behalf of their company? I know you can do this when acting as an individual, but if a business is too poor to afford representation, can they "wing it" as a last ditch measure? Or is it checkmate at that point?

If possible, I would like to see the good guys in these cases go down fighting, and try to delay proceedings and waste as much money of their well-funded opponents as possible.

If you are legally authorized to sign on behalf of a business you can sign court filings for it.

Only if the owner happens to be a lawyer. Otherwise it would be the illegal practice of law.

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