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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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