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Comment by cmdrfred | Hacker News Reader

Can't they use something trademarked in the api? for example you have to send 'Slack chat connect' to connect the api so open source stuff can't connect without violating their trademark?

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AFAIK trademarks don't work that way. You can "use" a trademark in a text or computer program more or less freely. What you can't do is do business under the trademarked name, or offer a competing (or substantially similar) product for sale that uses the trademarked name. Trademarks aren't so much about "IP protection" as they are about preventing consumer confusion, thus the standards are different. IANAL.

Makes sense, then maybe this would prevent him from listing slack anywhere on the repository as it might confuse users that this is a legitimate client.

It's a matter of degree. CentOS infamously chose to refer to Red Hat as "a prominent North American Linux vendor" and completely deleted the term "Red Hat" from everything out of an abundance of caution after receiving threats from Red Hat's lawyers, but that's probably overboard. It's generally allowed to use trademarks as "nominative uses", i.e., in direct reference to another's product that's not designed to create confusion. He would probably be fine to put in his README something like "An open implementation of the chat API provided by Slack". He definitely shouldn't use the term "Slack" in the name of the repo.

Like most non-flagrant potential IP violations, no one can really say for sure until a court hears the case and makes a judgement as to whether the use is fair or unfair, or likely to cause confusion among consumers or not.

IANAL.

Trademarks are about IP protection, but the exclusive right in the mark -- the thing that is property -- is the right to use the mark to market products in a particular domain.

This is something Apple does in their 'DSMOS' (don't steal Mac OS X) code (but they use copyright, not a trademark).

Mac OS X looks for a set of firmware variables containing a non-formatted version of following haiku (reproduced for the purpose of artistic comment):

    our hard work 
    by these words guarded
    please dont steal
    © Apple Computer Inc

If you shipped a transparently Mac-compatible x86 machine, you'd have to include this haiku (in some form) in the firmware.

Serious question: if I made a computer with the purpose of booting Mac OS X, noticed that it aborted after trying to read some bytes from the firmware, then wrote a program to iteratively test longer and longer sequences, would I be committing copyright infringement? What if I never look at the output of the program as text, but only as hex values?

IANAL, but speaking generally, the courts seem to take a dim view at technical workarounds, and instead focus on the actual intention and result.

In this particular case, I believe what you would have produced would be classified as a "circumvention" device under the DMCA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention).

The state of "IP" law makes me very sad.

If GNU is copyleft, is this then copy far right?

Sega tried this to prevent third party games from running. It didn't work: because their string was required for functionality, it wasn't protected by copyright. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade for details.

Cute. I remember some anti-spam outfit trying to "protect" emails with a copyrighted poem in the headers: http://www.oblomovka.com/writing/habeas%3A_the_antispam_haik...

I wonder how far back in OS(X) it dates?

It was introduced as part of the Intel transition, prior to public release.

Internally, Mac OS X ran on commodity PCs for quite some time before that and didn't include DSMOS.

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