Openbay name clash | Hacker News Reader

Openbay name clash

github.com

48 pointsjontro12 comments

Yeah, I'm one of the developers at www.openbay.com (I'm not Adam, I'm one of the other web developers).

We've spent a couple years trying to get our startup off the ground, and this really sucks for us. And I'm a fan of TPB - I've used it, and I admire their work. This isn't a case of some big corporation trying to exercise it's legal muscle to ward off bad PR, we're a few people running out of a co-working space in Cambridge.

Armchair lawyers will likely chime in how this isn't a "real" name clash and how they're different things in different lines of work (and they'd be right), but the thing that really sucks for us is SEO. Many users (especially older ones) have gotten in the habit of just typing "openbay" or "open bay" into google and not the URL bar - it's actually a pretty large percentage of our organic search hits. This happens even more if/when they hear about us in the press. What those users get for search results right now are a bunch of news sites about "piracy," which isn't a great thing, particularly for that demographic.

It'd be so awesome of the project could be renamed out of the kindness of the maintainers' hearts, but I know that's not likely. The cat's already out of the bag now. But we figured it wouldn't hurt to ask nicely.

Well there are already a whole bunch of articles referencing openbay and they will remain in the search results. Not really anything you can do about it.

After some reasonable amount of time they'll drop off the front page of Google, though - Google prefers new information to older information, in general.

Very generalised comment and not necessarily true (many factors come into it). But that implies that this company is going to generate enough of its own publicity to push out stories already ranking from techcrunch and arstechnica etc.

Is it possible search engine algorithms might at least sort results well enough that users can see the name clash for itself, and if people notice the news it maybe give a small boost that your name was good enough to be reformulated.

Beyond the name thing, I believe the source code for Pirate Bay is useless.

It was a crappy website, with bare-bone features, any web developer worth its salt could build a better torrent site in a couple weeks.

The value of Pirate Bay was their user base, uploader base and their resilience to legal threats and even a raid a few years ago. None of that has to do with the source code that powers the site.

The website itself wasn't that complex. The tracking software however was, but that's open source anyway.

http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/

Coincidentally; I had a failed project back in 2004 that was also called OpenBay (named after a Sharks Keep Moving song, in my case.) – I'm hoping your dignified request is listened to, it's refreshing to see something like this being handled politely.

Name clashes are extremely common and almost inevitable, and unfortunately there's not much the first project's owner can do about it. The trademark office would likely consider "auto sales" and "media sharing site" to be as distant as possible, and there are multiple TLDs for a reason.

While what you say is true, in this particular case I don't see any reason for ISOHunt not to change the name, since as far as I can tell it's just a pet project for them, and most people won't remember it in a month anyway.

"Clash"?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clash#Noun

5. Opposition; contradiction; such as between differing or contending interests, views, purposes etc.

a clash of beliefs

a personality clash

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