Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> * We didn't get a response so we assume its OK

No such assumption is stated. They decided to honor Gruber's specific requests (stop using the Standard Markup name, kill the domain and don't redirect it, and apology) and, as a courtesy offered him the opportunity to provide feedback on a list of alternative names to use instead of the Standard Markup name.

They never suggested that they took Gruber's silence as equivalent to consent, more that the silence (combined with the general shape of the names he had indicated would probably be acceptable) -- given that they aren't going to cancel the project, and they are going to immediately honor his request to stop using the old name -- leaves them no choice but to choose the new name without further input from Gruber.

View on HN

It still has "Markdown" in the title though. Gruber's silence is not going to be considered equivalent to consent by a court if it ever gets there. It really has to stick to the letter of the license, or its invalid. I'm assuming its trademarked though, not sure about any of the details.

> Gruber's silence is not going to be considered equivalent to consent by a court if it ever gets there.

I don't see what the formerly "Standard Markdown" project has done to accomodate Gruber as something done because they accepted that he had a legal claim that they were required to comply with, I see it as something that they did because they thought he made a demand that, whether or not it was mandatory, they felt it was reasonable and appropriate to comply with to the extent reasonably practical without tying things up for the project in an open-ended way.

Its not clear to me that Gruber has any basis for a claim in court here:

1) Its not clear to me that the license applies at all, in that its not clear that writing an spec that abstracts and regularizes the common behavior of several programs (which may or may not be all legally derivative of the one at issue) is a non-fair-use derivative work of the program at issue under copyright law, such that a license for that program would be required,

2) Further, its not clear to me that, aside from the copyright license on markdown.pl, that markdown was ever a trademark and, if it was, that it hasn't been either abandoned or genericized.

Of course, Gruber can sue and try to establish any basis for preventing the use of the name that he'd like.

It's clear that he has a copyright, since he's the original creator. All computer software is subject to copyright. He can even have been said to effectively police it when he ok'd github flavored markdown so he didn't abandon it or weaken the copyright.

Trademarks depend, I dunno the details. Knowing that would help.

The actual question is whether Markdown has indeed become so generic in programming that it no longer holds a copyright.

I think, yeah, maybe, since there is a standards movement going on.

They are in no way using his software. This is a combination of the syntax chosen by several independent markdown implementations written in several different languages (off the top of my head: Haskell (pandoc), Ruby (GitHub), probably Python (Reddit), maybe others).

I don't think many people actually use Gruber's perl code.

He holds the copyright of his code, which is not the issue at hand.

If he wants to protect the format, I suspect he'd need a patent.

Gruber's code is protected by copyright, but nobody uses his code as anything other than a reference.

The process expressed in the code could conceivably be patented, but he's taken no steps to do so to my knowledge. He freely and openly admits that the formatting syntax of Markdown is derived from existing de facto conventions, so good luck to anybody who tries to patent that.

The name "Markdown" could be trademarked, but he never did. Even if he had, his trademark would likely be invalid (genericized) since he has never enforced it.

Equally, his "specification" or Markdown is something he holds copyright of. But the new work is entirely separate to that.

There are really two things in the code. There is the spec about Markdown and two implementations that conform to the spec, written in C and JavaScript.

The former is a standard spec and test suite about derivatives of Markdown, some of which have basis in implicit and explicit blessing to use the name "Markdown." I'm not sure claim to the name makes sense in the spec definition is a valid claim, though.

It would be like requiring every author to specifically request official blessings to write about trademarked (registered or not) subjects. That'd be silly as it falls well within fair use of the name. The name "Standard" or to a lesser degree "Common" complicate ownership, certainly. I think I would have preferred the verb instead: "Standardized." Regardless, "Markdown" is the subject of the spec, not necessarily the product.

The latter implementations, however, probably shouldn't use the name Markdown in them at all if Gruber doesn't want them to use it. They really don't need to exist in the spec. They're just examples of valid interpreters. Spin them off and rename them, leaving the spec and tests.

What's clear to me in all of this is there is value in portable markdown that will parse the same across applications and services, whether we call it markdown or not.

The drama of it all is amusing, in any case.

The license requires explicit written permission by Gruber before using "Markdown". It's not fuzzy at all about this point. He didn't okay any name like X, he said he might approve of a name similar to X. That's not permission of anything yet.

> The license requires explicit written permission by Gruber before using "Markdown".

So? Even if the license is relevant to the legality of the use of the name, that has no bearing on whether or not the Common Markdown folks have assumed that Gruber's silence means consent -- they could simply disagree on the legal relevance of the license, and not see Gruber's consent as required.

Copyright law doesn't apply, and Gruber has probably lost any trademark rights when he failed to shut down the various Markdown flavours.

I'm not a lawyer and also not especially familiar with the laws in the US, but my guess would be that legally, he might not have a case.

Of course there are also questions of morality, but who cares about that ;)

They are neither using Gruber's code nor his spec, so his license doesn't matter to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com