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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Trademark law is probably pretty strong against repositories named "WhatsApp" or something very similar. Using the logo without permission as well.

Describing a project as "working with WhatsApp" would probably not be an actionable trademark infringement. Code that works with the WhatsApp API is almost certainly not "infringing", unless there's some "encryption" going on.

Unfortunately the DMCA takedown rules are such that Internet providers such as Github have basically no direct recourse and refusing to comply is not an option. Additionally, complainants don't have to prove much of anything to issue a takedown notice to a service provider. This is a seriously broken part of copyright law, IMO.

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That said, this complaint doesn't appear to me to be explicit enough to meet with GitHub's takedown policy (https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy), which requires "Identify the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed. The specificity of your identification may depend on the nature of the work you believe has been infringed, but may include things like a link to a web page or a specific post (as opposed to a link to a general site URL)." But the complaint itself, besides mentioning trademarks and the WhatsApp name, only says "unauthorized use of WhatsApp APIs, software, and/or services". But the existence of code that can use the WhatsApp API is not the same as actually using WhatsApp's services in an unauthorized manner, so I think this is ripe for some pushback.

WhatsApp can easily enough restrict API access to its own clients if it chooses to do so, which is a far better solution than trying to shut down what's apparently an easy library to write.

How would you propose they do that ? - there's nothing magical they can do that will identify official clients that third parties couldn't replicate.

Surely that is their problem?

And surely taking action against parties who exploit that fact is their solution.

How does an security PoC and API library fall under the DMCA? See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7273662

From what I recall, the DMCA is about copyright and trademark infringement.

The DMCA is also about "anti-circumvention". It makes it illegal to remove DRM that protects copyrighted content, or to create tools that do so.

That said, this takedown looks pretty bogus to my (untrained) eye.

> Interesting. Trademark law is probably pretty strong against repositories named "WhatsApp" or something very similar. Using the logo without permission as well.

They probably fall under nominative use, which is an affirmative fair use defense. Describing an API or implementation of XYZ as a "Webclient for XYZ" should be fine.

Agreed. It's not as if there aren't a zillion other Github repositories using trademarks in their names. Consumers of open source will generally understand the distinction between official libraries and third-party-developed libraries, and if trademark law is reasonable (IANAL), it should accept even "whatsapp" repos as fair use since no "reasonable person" would be confused. But it requires someone willing to fight Facebook, I guess.

Renaming them al "wazaa" should be fine too.

No law is reasonable.

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