There will be no license fees for the use of “hackathon” in Germany

young-targets.com

12 points·lukashed··8 comments

Um, no, they clearly say they're going to try and sue any commercial entity that uses the word hackathon to 'fund' their own conferences. Which is clearly wrong and I hope someone hands their ass to them. The whole thing is written in deliberate doublethink.

No mention of removing it in that article at all.

From the section marked "Update (07.05.2013)"

> Thats why we will delete the trademark “hackathon”. 10 companies that have been asked to license, have been informed that we take distance from plans to charge royalties.

They claim to be a "non-profit" organization organizing community events. I think it was not very intelligent on their part to (according to their post) try to finance themselves by effectively trademark-trolling community events.

"The attempt to take revenue for non-commercial purposes on a licensing model failed."

Irrespective of my opinion on trademarking words: How can they say after just a few days that a revenue model failed? It seems a bit fast.

I think it's likely they realized they were wrong about how many people would back off and settle.

Much rather, given that they intend to start up this "Tech_Hub" thing, they realized, that enforcing licensing claims (and the negative PR that generates) would give them a bad public perception... esp. in the dev world which they seem to be targeting with said "Tech_Hub"

So, uh, they're trying to target the dev world while not actually having the mindset of the dev world?

It's a nice way to say "we tried to trademark-troll by asking small-scale hackathlon organizers for 2500 EUR and got our ass whipped by the community".

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