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Comment by dylandrop | Hacker News Reader

Is this really the best usage of your funding cash? Seems like half of 53's $15M can go down the drain with this sort of thing. I sort of expect FB Paper to flop like the Facebook phone OS thing; if I were 53 I wouldn't be going so ballistic over this. Best case, they get the trademark and Facebook whittles down all of their funding in order for them to get it. Better for them to just move on and recognize that their product and Facebook's are different enough and it's not worth having the SEO from people searching the word "paper" to go into an expensive legal battle.

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If there goal is to make money and let's be honest, that is the goal of most start-ups, is this really a bad plan? It seems like it is a high risk/high reward proposition that most people on here love. Sure the odds Facebook's Paper being a success aren't sky high. Same with the chance of Facebook agreeing to a licensing agreement on the name. But when you compare the potential income from that to a fancy iPad app and stylus, it seems clear that litigation route might be the better use of VC funds.

And that is the problem with the current legal environment.

I don't think they expect Facebook to license the name; I think they don't want to dilute their name.

EDIT: Interestingly enough for me, I found it kind of repulsive that King.com trademarked "Candy" but I don't find this repulsive (I guess because either I am a hypocrite, or because "Paper" is their entire product name).

> I sort of expect FB Paper to flop

I hope not. It's much nicer than the official Facebook app. I think they ought to replace the official client with it.

It is prettier, but I didn't find a way to switch from 'Top Stories', to 'Most Recent'.

I hate 'Top Stories'. If I followed/friended you, I want to see what you have to say. If I think it's to much I'll suffer, or unfollow/unfriend. 'Most Recent' preserves order, and timing. Many of my friends post in such a way that timing, especially in relation to earlier posts, is important, 'Top Stories' doesn't preserve that.

As far as it's 'News' stuff, I still use rss. I already curate content I am interested in. I have spent a fair bit of time (across time, not all at once) curating my feeds. All of that to say, It didn't appeal to me.

At this point it's some nice PR. Until they start spending real money on legal, it's all smoke and mirrors.

it costs about $1000-$2000

Yeah, filing a trademark doesn't cost that much in the grand scheme of things, especially when you've built up as much brand equity around the name as 53 has.

A lawsuit on the other hand would burn through cash, but IANAL so I don't know if the damages they could extract from Facebook would be worth it. Maybe being in a lawsuit against goliath would make the lawsuit pay for itself as free advertising, since I reckon journalists will enjoy writing about such a case.

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