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Comment by demetris | Hacker News Reader

Maybe contacting their hosting provider could be an additional way to approach the problem, since, from what I can tell, the messages they send to contributors are spam.

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We (Django) already threatened that a while back. They still insist they will not remove projects or stop collecting donations on behalf of non-consenting projects. All they did was manually disable some of the spam coming toward our committers.

Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?

You do realise that there is life and even entire civilizations outside of the USA, where DMCA holds no jurisdiction and the entire idea of suing becomes much more complicated? Especially when it seems from the GitHub discussion thread the tip4commit founder lives in a place where there is no regulations regarding what is a spam and what is not. ;)

DMCA being relevant or not, my understanding is that the takedown notice goes to the website's ISP (LINODE-US in this case).

If a project name was trademarked, you might be able to get them for trading on that name, maybe?

Can you trademark open source project names?

I think so, yes. See Iceweasel[0], the custom Debian build of Firefox. I'm not sure that you'd be successful in using trademark law in this particular scenario though.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

Absolutely. Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache, Debian, etc are all registered trademarks and can not be used by others without permission.

And most famously Linux: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:88w...

Yes, in fact GPLv3 specifically deals with trademarks in section 7e).

Hell yeah.

Drupal trademark policy http://drupal.com/trademark Apache trademark policy http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/ Eclipse trademark policy https://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. can't find the policy right now.

Maybe, but if they make it clear that they're not sponsored or endorsed by the project in question, it'd probably be considered nominative fair use, at least in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

They are soliciting donations using the project name. I don't think that falls into nominative use. It'd be really weird if I could use the logo of the Salvation Army to solicit donations for my own organization even if I intended to give some of the donated money to them.

It depends on the country, in Canada you can certainly report them to the CRTC as breaking the law (CASL). http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm

Emailing someone in Canada now requires consent (various legal ways) or close personal relationship. It doesn't cost anything to report them https://services.crtc.gc.ca/pub/rapidsccm/Default-Defaut.asp... . But if you really wanted to pursue them, you would have to hire a lawyer, a complaint doesn't have the same weight or speed of a legal filing.

This just goes to show you has clueless the developers are with regards to international policy and law.

Who holds the trademark for Django? That person or organisation might have standing in some jurisdictions to ask for it to be removed.

(IANAL, TINLA)

The Django Software Foundation is custodian of the registered IP of Django, including the trademark:

https://www.djangoproject.com/trademarks/

If you want to support Django and its community and development (which includes more than just commits to a git repository), there is also a mechanism to donate to the DSF:

https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/donate/

Django's trademark is held by the Django Software Foundation.

Not sure how the process works, but what about getting their domain added to Spamhaus's lists? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project

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