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Comment by pclark | Hacker News Reader

why do you care about him infringing on your brand? He's helping you guys out.

I believe you have to be able to show that you tried to stop others from infringing on your brand to protect your trademark at some future point in court.

Google sent letters to many people when 'google' was becoming a verb most likely for this reason.

Yep. If you don't protect your trademarks and copyrights you may lose them.

Trademark law is different from copyright law.

With trademarks you do have to defend them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_trademark...

However with copyrights they are yours from the moment you write something down to 70 years after you are dead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Obtaining_and_enforci...

(And the way things are going, that 70 year number will go up by 10 years every 10 years.)

Thanks for clarifying that. I'm not really sure why I said copyright as I know better than that, I must have been tired or not thinking straight.

The users of "izillow" might not understand that "izillow" is not affiliated with zillow itself. It has the potential to damage their brand.

Is that a bad thing? It's their data, and it's helping them. I think the damage to their brand among developers is happening right here (I'm sure as hell staying away from Zillow in the future). Compare that with the 'damage' it would cause some random consumers who may or may not have a problem with izillow. Not worth it.

There are people out there who will read "unofficial version" and still not know that it's not official. Those people will not be any more clued in just because it has a different name - if it looks/works like zillow, it is zillow. Targetting this level of understanding is futile.

I went and looked at it, and I would have probably assumed it was affiliated with Zillow if I hadn't read this posting first.

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