SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter | Hacker News Reader

SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

sparkfun.com

60 pointsbisceglie25 comments

Not cool. I realize that companies feel like they have to protect their trademark, even in borderline cases. However, this seems like a boneheaded move for SPARC. People using SparkFun tend to be young techies, the kind of people who might go on to become the hardware purchasing decision makers in larger companies.

I appreciate SparkFun's response to the issue. I feel that it is very personal and down-to-earth. SparkFun is doing the right thing by telling their customers and the rest of the world about this pressure from SPARC. I'm sure that their loyal customer base will respond as well. The post writer even encourages them to email SPARC about the issue.

By the way, don't go to sparc(dot)org as linked to in the post. It is a malware/attack site. I think the intended link was sparc.com

The humour being that Sparc has bigger fish to fry than people with "Spark" in their name.

Having been through this before (posted below), it occurs to me that Sun/SI may not have any idea whats going on here. This could all be the result of an overzealous paralegal just trying to make-work. There are likely geeks at Sun/SI who use and enjoy Sparkfun products. One well placed call to the right guy at Sun/SI could solve the whole thing. They could reach a $0 "settlement" where Sun/SI protects their mark by "taking action", and Sparkfun gets to go on and conduct business as usual.

On the other hand, as I said, if Sun/SI really wants that name, there is likely little Sparkfun can do to stop them taking it.

Edit: Fujitsu is also connected to SI as a founding member.

That Sun/SI may not be behind it is B.S. and not an excuse. The law firm represents the person/corporation paying them. If SPARC doesn't want these sent out, they would tell the law firm or fire them and hire a new one.

Go to http://tess2.uspto.gov/ and do a basic search on 'spark' and 'sparc'. Are they sending c & d letters to these people too?

If they're suing SparkFun it must mean they want to use it in some 'Fun With Sparc' marketing campaign. The agency that came up with the idea is now panicked because they didn't bother to do a domain search prior to the pitch and when it finally came up during last Tuesday's status meeting it was decided to send it to legal and the person 'who handles these things.'

May as well do a trademark search on 'backpedal' while we're at it.

I like SparkFun and have purchased from them. There is absolutely no confusing them with the other guys who push iron (and now databases) for a living.

Congratulations, guys; you've made it into the big time!

Seriously. Somebody remind me how hard it's supposed to be to get into law school again? Sure, you gotta protect your client's trademark, but this is ridiculous.

Reminds me of when I worked for a little hardware company and we got an order from RamBus requiring that we disclose all sales we made of devices using RAM chips because we weren't paying them royalties. Our attorney (nice having a lawyer on your Board) just crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash, "they're just on a fishing expedition. I'll wait til they get serious!" Was the last we ever heard of it.

Well that's Deja-vu for me big time. The exact same thing happened to us. It turned out that the "plaintiff" was not even aware that the law firm involved was taking the action. They had used them years ago to register some marks and had some sort of perpetual retainer agreement. The lawyer had just run low on clients and was fishing for billable hours. The other company were friends of ours so we settled it most amiably. They were as surprised as we were.

The bad new is that sparkfun is still going to lose even if they get to keep sparkfun.com. When I looked into the cost of defense, even in the right... its likely worth more than all of sparkfun the company put together. Their case seems ever weaker than ours.

I'd heard stories like this before, and thought them to be exaggerations. Surely the insanity couldn't have reached that level. It must just be sour grapes from those companies who were just a little bit shady. If it happened to us, well, we'd just explain that we had no ill intentions, it was an honest mistake, surely no one would confuse our name with... There are people in this world who have decided that its A-OK to make their living antagonizing the clearly innocent. This for me was the biggest shock.

Choose a new name boys, you're patent/trademark activists now, just like me.

Edit: Oh! I'm definitely ordering my Sparkfun hoodie while I still can! If they do lose the name, nothing will say "arduino geek" quite like that defunct nameplate. Wearing that badboy to maker-faire will be like wearing a Lion-O tshirt to comic-con.

now that Sparc mention it... SparkFun does sound like SparcFun,

Let's hope the two parties can resolve this amicably.

Choosing a domain name/brand is so damn hard. You can think you're in the clear and years later an established company can realise or assert there's a conflict.

Maybe we should start a grassroots campaign to insist that SPARC is pronounced "sparsee".

How about just "sparse", relating to the intelligence behind this letter?

Why does this happen in this day and age?

Another case of trademark trolling: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=8810200

I'm loving that Rock Art has been getting so much press about this. Their sales must be sky-rocketing.

I live a town over from them and am lucky enough to be able to pick up their beers in any liquor store and it is on tap in any restaurant or bar around here. Their ridge-runner is my choice during winter.

Is it really that ridiculous? I'm not a lawyer, but I can see both sides to this.

The whole purpose of a trademark is to protect your brand from anything that could be construed as "confusingly similar". Spark and Sparc sound the same and are nearly identical in spelling, and they are both involved in the tech industry.

Whomever made the decision to send a C&D wasn't completely out of line in their reasoning. (Especially since it does not cost a whole lot to send a C&D. It will cost a lot more to take it to court, which I expect will be a factor in SparkFun's decision making process.)

That said, saying the two similar names are in the "tech industry" may not be sufficient justification for the trademark dispute any longer. The industry has so much breadth nowadays and there are so many businesses involved, as long as SparkFun can prove that there is enough differentiation between what they do and what Sparc does they can probably get around it (with some legal tapdancing).

This would probably not be an issue if SparkFun sold handmade chocolate candies :-)

Firefox thinks sparc.org is an "attack site":

http://i36.tinypic.com/f2trth.png

So does Google (http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://ww...)

"Of the 244 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-10-22.

Malicious software includes 12 trojan(s), 8 exploit(s), 6 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine."

I found this as well. I think that he meant to link to sparc.com but instead linked to spark.org which is a known attack site.

By the way sparc.com appears to be done right now. Its probably DDOSed by all the people complaining.

No, sparc.org is the right domain, most likely someone thought it funny to report sparc.org (although google's malware interception page states that it's been reported several times over the last couple of months, so maybe Sparc Intl. really are hosting malware?)

I have to say, I agree with the lawyers on this one. They are similar products, i.e. electronics, not like coffee and computers. Brand names aren't just written, they are spoken. They are both electronics. SPARC customers could think SparkFun is actually related to SPARC.

I think the SparkFun team is going to lose this one.

Looks like some lawyer needs to justify his compensations.

I really love sparkfun, it a great company with a great site, i feel terribe about this. You have to be crazy to think that a SPARC computer can be so FUN that you would spect to find something about it in sparkfun.com

SparkFun has been operating nationally (internationally?) for years. You'd think somebody at SPARC would've noticed by now. If I were SparkFun, I'd expect that SPARC's inaction over all these years would count for something.

They applied for a trademark recently though; I imagine that is what sparked (oh dear :() this off.

Sounds like a soon-to-be botched attempt at "job preservation".

Just rename your company OrACoolFunk.

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