4Chan Founder Moot Sends Cease and Desist Letter to Startup Moot.It
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It may be a moot point in this case, but considering the changing search landscape, attorney's need to be more careful about how they use Google search results (and others) as evidence.
"He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot (always written with lower case)."
Yet, the attorney in the letter uses "MOOT", and not "moot". Does letter case matter in this kind of dispute, especially if one convention is predominately used by the plaintiff?
In every case, the wikipedia page for Chris Poole showed up within the top 5 results. His Twitter page and links to 4chan show up in the top 10 results in one order or another in all results as well.
I'm not taking sides either way, but the attorney's logged in status doesn't have any relevance in this instance.
I see what you did there.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/31/anonymous_french_fir...
I don't know what has happened after these threats.
Before Anonymous got "good guy" publicity for supporting Wikileaks, people calling themselves anonymous were mostly known for trolling: finding emotionally sensitive people and communities, and harassing them both online and offline for their own amusement.
Given they are in the business of allowing users to post content, the risk/reward looks to be heavily weighted towards having their service (in the best case!) being spammed with shocking content 24/7. They haven't thought this through.
I wonder if they've got any VC backing, because I don't see many investors trying that one on for size.
If your service is meant to handle the communication for forums and comments then two of your biggest challenges will be dealing with spam and to a lesser extent, malicious users. How do you test systems to combat these issues? You would throw test data at them. From their site: "Our servers will handle whatever you throw at them, at no cost." For a person with the appropriate mindset, that's practically a dare.
While it's certainly a long shot that this is their actual intent, it would be one way for them to fine-tune their system.
Moot is a verb. To moot something means "to raise it as a subject for discussion". They're selling discussion forum software with a domain name, moot.it, that essentially means "discuss it". It's a clever, relevant name and domain hack given what they do.
The overlap with Chris Poole's screen name is at least as likely entirely coincidental as it is some scheme to ride off the coattails of Poole.
I think it's fair to say that a large majority of internet users would have no idea of the founder of 4chan. Plus the term is being used in a descriptive allusive sense from what I can tell. A firm rebuttal is in order.
Preventing this kind of confusion is the entire point of Trademark law, and whether the company's name did this intentionally or not, I think Moot has a reasonable cause for concern and case.
I personally think moot is very much descriptive of the 'discussion' in general. Moot, the 4chan creator would most probably argue the name has acquired distinctiveness through usage but this generally requires a high evidential threshold in terms of the reasonable person having familiarity with the term as a unique identifier. Whilst if 4chan had been called moot from the start he would have had a stronger case, I do not think the reasonable internet user would be aware of moot's name let alone identify it with online discussion.
There is quite a strong case I think. Moot is the online brand of a person who runs one of the most popular forums on the internet. Starting a forum service with his name is quite clearly in a grey area if not outright infringement.
However the main reason why there will be not be a long drawn out battle is because there are likely to be no damages and moot.it are unlikely to have any real assets.
I fail to see how "moot", the name of... well, moot's... online persona bears "only a tangential relationship" to said online persona.
> Although I wouldn’t necessarily call 4chan a “Goliath” of the internet, Poole has certainly taken the Goliath position on this.
...just because someone is large, doesn't mean they are de facto wrong or impervious to harm, and it certainly doesn't make it appropriate to try to win the audience with a silly David vs. Goliath analogy: you need a serious argument here, not cute soundbites.
Personally, I feel like moot has a good argument here: what he has been working on for a while now, both with 4chan and Canv.as, is "the future of online discussions"; if I see a company with his name and that same mission, I bet I would have been confused.
I'm not sure he should get to prevent any discussion forum software from using that word, or the clever dns hack moot.it to advertise said software that lets you "discuss it", because he happened to choose a common-ish verb as a screen name, years ago.
Common? Please can you point to any online usage of the word in that way?
I know lots of people use it to mean "no longer relevant".
> 2. N. Amer. (orig. Law). Of a case, issue, etc.: having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic. Now the usual sense in North America.
"meaningless/irrelevant" is the adjectival form of moot, not the verb, and it's worth reinforcing that this is a usage shift specific to North America. To "moot it" doesn't mean "to make it irrelevant"; rather, things originally became "moot" when they were topics you could argue over but which had no further relevance in the law, and the latter grew to dominate its usage in the adjectival form in North America. But that usage didn't migrate back to the verb, or appear at all abroad.
Here's a usage in verbal noun form to mean "a meeting for discussion": http://www.themagicboxstore.com/paganmoot.htm
And there are, of course, the well known "moot courts", so named not because they're "unpractical/irrelevant/meaningless" court but instead because they're forums for the students to debate the law.
Keep in mind that UPS has successfully trademarked a color, as have many other companies; "Apple" is a trademark, "Time" is a trademark, "Shell" is a trademark, "Caterpillar" is a trademark ... and odds are, as you read each of those common words, you knew exactly which company holds the trademark.
Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
That's completely wrong. The majority of the world doesn't know who Moot is. The majority doesn't even know what 4chan is, even if they do start most of the internet memes.
If I asked my mom what "moot" meant, she'd probably tell me something like "something that's no longer relevant or worth arguing about". Using HN comments as a confirmation tool is equally ridiculous. We are not the right community to use when determining the legal usage of a phrase.
While each of the common names your have listed are trademarks, they are trademarks within their respective fields. It would be completely appropriate for me to start a watch shop and call it "Time" (assuming there isn't already a national or state trademark of watch shops called "Time").
Moot is an online persona, not a product. I'm not familiar with New York state law on "public rights of publicity", but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have exclusive rights to the word "Moot".
This would be like Tom from MySpace suing Tom's shoes or TomTom. (Okay, not quite because the company is working on forum software which is close to 4chan, but it's not far off).
Unless you're prepared to argue that the majority of the world uses online discussions or talks about online discussion systems, or that a conversation with your mom is a suitable anecdote when talking about online discussions, I think you should reconsider just how "completely wrong" my argument was.
Because, you're right, the examples I cited are trademarks within their respective fields, and that was the entire point of my comment.
I apologize for not making that more clear.
This all seems like a big-fish, small-pond vs. small-fish, medium-pond argument to me.
Moot maybe incredibly influential in his corner of the 'net, but the larger world probably doesn't know him. Moreover, the brand of his product isn't "moot", it's 4chan. To top it off, "moot" isn't a rare word, it's a commonly used word in English. All of this combines to make it very difficult for him to try to make any direct claims against Moot.it.
Some googling and brief dives into etymological references are suggesting to me that the original usage is more common in Canada and the UK than the US.
> Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)
Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.
> Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
I don't disagree. But note that it's Chris Poole's lawyer who's claiming that Moot can't be used as a trademark on the basis that Chris Poole and his screen name are so famous that they're entitled to Right of Publicity protection under New York law, which strikes me as stretching that law rather past its original intent (is Rand Corporation violating Paul Rand's Right of Publicity? Does Richard Gere have a case against Top Gear?).
4Chan has 22 million uniques per month and a million posts per day [1], and seems to be referenced regularly on all of the other "big" online forum sites. And, when Time gave in and acknowledged the poll results for Christopher Poole as their most influential person of the year, they referred to him first as "moot" and the stunt picked up coverage in mainstream publications like the LA Times [2].
So, I think you may be underestimating 4Chan's influence. But, I'll concede that I may be overestimating it as well.
[1]: http://www.4chan.org/advertise [2]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/04/4chan-tim...
To suggest that a person owns a dictionary definition of a word that predates their existence by ~800 years[1] smacks of hubris
[1] OED
-Via Dictionary.com
Given the nature of the service (being commenting/discussion) I struggle to see how this would stand up in court, however I'm not a lawyer.
Secondly, did Moot.it's lawyer threaten to sue Moot's lawyer? Can you do that? Can you sue the lawyers of your opponents? I imagine that could get very nasty.
The federal government, for one.
There aren't really many groups I'd be worried about pissing off en masse as a startup except perhaps anonymous.
Ultimately Moot could use his social clout to get them to switch names. IANAL but I'm pretty sure it's a legal name.
Edit: Oh, and a forum component. Also, I think Moot.it are trying to sell a product, while Poole seems to be building another community.
From Wikipedia:
> In the United States, neither federal nor state registration is required to obtain rights in a trademark. An unregistered mark may still receive common law trademark rights. Those rights, for example, may extend to its area of influence—usually delineated by geography. As such, multiple parties may simultaneously use a mark throughout the country or even state. An unregistered mark may also be protected under the federal "Lanham Act" (15 USC § 1125) prohibition against commercial misrepresentation of source or origins of goods. Unregistered marks are also protectable in the United States under Lanham Act §43(a).
Moot-the-person on the other hand is quite obscure; nobody knows who he is or associates the word "moot" with him other than a small handful of people in one online community. I.e. it's not a well-established brand, and using the word isn't likely to cause confusion or mis-association for the general public.