Calibre beta announced | Hacker News Reader

Calibre beta announced

calibreapp.com

38 pointsbrettgoulder20 comments

I was a bit confused by this, since I usually associate "calibre" with the e-book creation/conversion software with that name.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Came here to say the same thing; I excitedly thought it was an announcement for a new Calibre beta.

Looks like Calibre also holds a trademark: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:h6j...

There seems to be a high likelihood of confusion given that both are software products, but IANAL.

I thought the same but was not excited, because Calibre is almost completely perfect already. If anybody reading this ever wants to convert ebooks from one format to another, or turn web pages into ebooks, or any such thing, definitely check it out.

I think the trademark issue should be OK.

My understanding is that you can have overlap in trademarked names when it's in very different markets, but IANAL

Knowing the court's record of incompetence when it comes to technology, I doubt they'd be able to distinguish the two beyond "software companies".

Link expired. Try: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=77660789&caseType=SERIAL_N...

IANAL but I don't think the trademark is an issue. Might make it a bit hard to search for, though, when "calibre app" is dominated by calibre e-book software.

Here's a permalink http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3666525&caseType=US_REGIST...

Yep came here to say this also

Happens to me quite often on HN. I wish people would append [TypeOfSoftware] or something like that to submitted titles.

Ditto. Was hoping it was something I could use on my iPad.

Oh, I thought that the e-book software was launching a mobile/tablet version or something. That would have excited me far more than yet another "me-too" analytics vendor, playing in a niche somewhere between Google Analytics and New Relic.

Why on earth didn't they Google their own proposed name before releasing this? It's one thing to use the same name as another entity in a different field, but to rip-off a name that is already a well known software package too? They'll be lucky to make the first page of Google search results for their own name.

Was confused due to the name being shared with a very popular e-book (and e-reader) management app: http://calibre-ebook.com/ . This looks like an interesting browser performance analytics service

how hard is it to google your app's name before releasing it? or do you know and just not care that you're taking somebody else's name?

One is ebook software, the other is a performance optimization tool.

You can have different products using the same name so long as they're not in the same category.

So the guy who made this software isn't "taking someone else's name", he's using a name that isn't being used in that category (AFAIK).

Background: I once had to settle a trademark infringement case.

according to the technicality of trademark law, it's probably okay (depending on how good the lawyers are - in some cases a court desides that "technology" counts as a market, in other cases they want to get super specific). from the perspective of being able to find your product in a search engine or just generally not being a dick, whoever made this calibre took the name of the ebook software.

It might be legal but it definitely is a very poor strategy.

Using the same name as another software product may be allowed legally, but it's still a terrible idea to name your company/product in such a way that it becomes nearly impossible to even discover.

> You can have different products using the same name so long as they're not in the same category.

Usually that is taken as meaning categories such as 'beverages' vs 'cars'.

Trying to extend it to saying 'my three-wheeled car product called Ford Focus is in a different category to that four-wheeled one' would be unlikely to succeed

A recent example in the software domain was Python ( cloud services ) versus Python ( the language ). Python cloud services is now called Veber Cloud.

This looks awesome! Really useful for front-end devs.

Agreed. This type testing has been relegated to individual browser testing for too long. Hopefully tools like this will enable teams to address browser-side performance testing in the same way that tools like New Relic have enabled app-side performance evaluation.

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