>As Certified B Corporations and leaders of this emerging economy, we believe:
> That we must be the change we seek in the world.
> That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
> That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
> To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.
For those big corps, the large sum of money is mostly hiring consultants to fill the paperwork needed to pass the certification
But what I see here in France is mostly young companies getting certified as a proof of them being built better than the big ones that they are competing with
For instance, most of the new IT consultancoies are B Corp certified and promote it a lot, even though they work for the same customers as the big old ones
So now there are companies that are getting rid of their B Corp cert because they say it lost its meaning and being BCC is getting more and more a sign of being a bad company doing virtue signaling
Overall I think that business certifications can't work above a certain scale, because then they become just a hoop that needs to be addressed and not an actual engagement leading every business decisions.
I wrote B corps an email highlighting the issue and asking if this actions align with their principles.
They seem to be very busy. It seems showing that your corporation accompanies positive social impact, fairness, and responsibility is in high demand.
> Thank you for reaching out and for you interest in the B Corp Movement! Despite our high ambition for an inclusive, equitable and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet; we are still a small team. So kindly allow us to come back to you within 2-3 weeks
> Due to a high level of inquiries recently, it may take us longer than usual to respond to your message. We will answer questions in the order received. Response times may be up to 2 weeks.
Having bought a trademark in the EU and the US for an open-source project as well (with the US being denied). It sucks, it's a waste of time and money, and my advice is to not bother.
None of the 'normal' eventualities are all that scary or bad.
If a trademark holder asks you to change your name, just change your name - your users don't care as much as you. If done well, you can milk a name change into getting more attention to your project.
If it's a name you've used longer than them and are really attached to, you could gamble and just keep using it - all a trademark does is let them recover costs IFF they can prove your claim of use it is false and harmful by being in the same category.
Lawsuits really aren't the fun kind of thing a 150m dollar company wants to get entangled in, especially held in unfamiliar foreign courts they might lose - unless maybe you go around attacking their trademark.
This comes from someone who dated someone for three years who was in a lawsuit when I got to know them, and was still in a lawsuit when we split. It affected them daily, hundreds and hundreds of hours were lost, thousands and thousands of dollars went to a nice, well-intended family lawyer.
I’m almost 100% in agreement, but context matters, and attitude matters.
If you’re up against a behemoth, figure out how to get out ASAP.
But I’ve learned that small claims lawsuits can actually be quite fun! Earlier this year I sued a former landlord in small claims court. He had entered my rented space while I was away (without notice, multiple times) and then refused to return my security deposit when I moved out.
I went into it with a “let’s have fun and learn” attitude. I had never sued someone and I’d never represented myself in court. I read a lot, had some good conversations with LLMs (and then fact-checked them!) about the laws and case history in my area, then filed my suit.
After he dodged the summons three times, I discovered I could file a motion for alternative service (post on his front door, post in a newspaper, etc). When I went to court to argue for that motion, he actually showed up in court! So I asked the judge if he could be served right there, and he was!
Our trial was highly entertaining, I caught him in a bald-faced lie, then looked at the judge and said I’m not sure how both of these things he said could be true, I can’t figure out how it adds up but maybe you can.
I won the case, the judge awarded me less than I was asking for, but more than I was actually owed.
I was kinda hoping he would not pay (that’s common) in which case I was looking forward to learning about how to garnish his wages or put a lien on his property. But he’s actually paying me in monthly installments for the next very many months. He could pay me all at once so he’s being a bit of a jerk, but at least he’s paying.
All-in-all, I knew I had a solid case, had fun along the way, and didn’t spend more than a few bucks on court fees. In that specific context, it made sense for me and I’m happy I did it.
> I was kinda hoping he would not pay (that’s common) in which case I was looking forward to learning about how to garnish his wages or put a lien on his property.
If he has assets to his name and the action was against him, I don’t see him doing that. In most countries you can hire private recovery, so the process will be very fast to collect.
"Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons, I've got em 'cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they screw everything up."
Danny DeVito
My wife is a lawyer so I collect amusing statements about them ;-)
This is the side of lawsuits that you don’t see every time someone on Reddit or Hacker News confidently tells you to lawyer up and go to court.
Even seemingly simple issues can turn into never ending money pits that consume thousands of hours of your life spread over months or years.
If you’re really committed to something then you should evaluate how much time and money you’re willing to put into pursuing it. Unless both of those values are uncomfortably high numbers, just move on.
Depends on your philosophy, honestly. If you're a hedonist, then yeah, get free from lawsuits as soon as possible and go back to munching candy. If you're am altruist, throwing yourself into the lion's den to eventually effect social good might be smart. If you're a nihilist, you can pick either, it's all the same when the sun goes supernova.
One alternative is to create a website that outs the company that is harming you in a way that is non-libelous and just tells your story, and then focus fully on SEO and GEO to ensure that the other company sees your site front-and-center when searching for their own.
You may get more attention this way, because it can affect the company more than the optics of a legal dispute. It’s not revenge, and you shouldn’t have that intent, if you want it to work.
However this method, and other similar methods used in the U.S. such as filing BBB complaints, are mostly used for harm done to consumers rather than businesses affected by disputes, so it may not be the best advice.
I empathise with the advice, even aspire to it. Despite that, I abhor a bully getting away with being a bully and would feel discontent not putting up a fight on principle.
> Surely the things you value are worth hanging on to/fighting for?
Maybe. For me at least, the art is in what you choose to value in different contexts, rather than in absolute terms. Thinking about this specific case, I might value my own peace of mind, money, and time much more highly than justice or retribution.
Other times, something we value is taken from us and living in the past, spending our days wishing for it, etc. can prevent us from "moving on". It can become an anchor or baggage.
The cultures I'm aware of that practice meditation value letting go of the things that keep you attached to physical existence, because they're looking forward to a spiritual existence that value more highly.
For my part, I feel that there's value in critically examining parts of your life and deciding what really matters. If something matters, fight for it. If it turns out something didn't, or it doesn't any more, let it go so you can make room in your life for more important things.
"You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure
the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
Choose peace or violence. Violence doesn't have to mean physical destruction or harm, it can mean self psychological harm as you put aside your comfort to further a goal or your values.
Peace is a perfectly valid option for people to pick. If they can master it, they can weather any depredation the world throws at them. Which may be many if society continues to slip slide into fascism.
However I believe most good things in the world came at the behest of violence - again not necessarily physical, but at minimum people sacrificing personal peace. Woman's suffrage, black suffrage in America, the civil rights act, LGBT rights in the UK, the overthrow of the kmt military dictatorship in Taiwan. Endless examples.
> However I believe most good things in the world came at the behest of violence - again not necessarily physical, but at minimum people sacrificing personal peace. Woman's suffrage, black suffrage in America, the civil rights act, LGBT rights in the UK, the overthrow of the kmt military dictatorship in Taiwan. Endless examples.
Absolutely. I would further assert that path of least resistance is very often not the right one. The art, as I think you imply, is in "knowing" when to pick up a fight and persist, vs. when not.
> The art, as I think you imply, is in "knowing" when to pick up a fight and persist, vs. when not.
I think you're right on this, and if I implied it I think it's because that's where my thoughts have been heading without me realizing it.
When I wrote that blog post I was still in a mindset of "expend maximum effort at all costs." A new review strategy of my day to day and month to month life made me realize that this way of doing things wasn't making me more effective, just leading to peaks and troughs.
I've recently accepted that energy is a finite resource that needs to be recharged. Practically, that meant I needed to figure out what costs my energy and what renews it, and as I plan my days and weeks, schedule around this paradigm.
I think my activism is one of those things that's trickier because it energizes to an extent because it actualizes my values, but also it's tremendously energy draining because it takes time and huge amounts of willpower to do any given action - like overcoming my poor local language ability and nervousness to confront an illegally parked car blocking pedestrians.
So that's another aspect of this peace vs violence dynamic you've got me thinking about in a new light - yes, you need to choose your battles, if nothing else temporaly so you can put the battle at a time you'll have the energy to deal with it.
Life is too short for far more things than just this. It always strikes me just how much time we waste on stuff we won't care about in one year or five. Myself included. Time is by far our most precious commodity.
> At the end, the only thing that ever matters is the good we tried to do
But even this doesn't matter. If all goes to dust, even the good we do or the love we share. If we do evil, or if we hate the strangers, it makes no difference. We might as well do that if it satisfies us.
This is a philosophy, or "opinion", and should not be confused with truth. If the world was 100% evil people and beings, across all of history, forever, the present would look very different than it does now. And none of us know what the future holds.
lovely said! I think that's the right way to see things. somewhat forces me to give up on the mark, because nobody and nothing really cares about that in a few weeks, if not even days. On the other side, among the good things that you share while you are on this planes is making sure we live in justice. And I can't stop thinking about this being injustice. I could be entirely wrong though.
I suppose this, again, depends on the country. They can get very expensive, especially if you're in a "loser pays" country. And a judge may even then divide the costs more fairly, and you find that your lawyer costs exceeded the monetary value of the judgement you won. That on top of potentially stressing years and years about it.
And then the loser may request a next level court to consider the case, potentially leading to more stressful years and a lot of additional financial risk.
We met her ex once randomly on the street, and the first thing he asked was if she was still in her lawsuit.
Since the other part in the lawsuit lived in another part of the same house, you became paranoid about whether they would hear what you said through the walls, and you would be made painfully aware of the conflict every morning on the way to work.
It felt like a curse.
I would never wish for anyone to end up in a lawsuit.
But for real...just change the name of your project. It sucks, but the ruling was handed down, you lost the dispute.
Nobody's going to mind that the name changed. Firefox used to be called Firebird and changed due to trademark disputes. Dozens of open source projects have changed their names when they forked off of a corporate project, like LibreOffice and MariaDB.
I know that OP may be fond of the name but it's just a name.
> Firefox used to be called Firebird and changed due to trademark disputes.
It was first called Phoenix, then a trademark dispute forced them to rebrand to Firebird, then a trademark dispute forced them off that name too. Firefox was the third public name for that project. I'm surprised they didn't also get sued by Clint Eastwood[1] and have to change again.
Don't forget the greatest enemy of both abusive companies and abusive government: the news media. And this definitely seems big enough for them.
See if you can "shop" around (start local) to see who's interested in publishing a story something along the lines of "The EU has declared war on small businesses. I'm being forced to pay thousands of euros because a brand-new company decided they wanted to steal my years-old project name."
The news media is abusive companies. Some of the worst. And they are one of the largest beneficiaries and supporters of abusive government, like how they are attempting (and sometimes succeeding) at getting governments to shake down companies who link to their sites. That's not to say they aren't sometimes the enemy of other abusive companies or governments, but that's purely incidental and transactional in cases where it goes against them.
I saw you may rename your project. IANAL, but don't do that. They might have invalidated a European registered trademark, but you have first use and continuous worldwide use which means a lot. Not all trademarks need to be registered. Again, IANAL, but I can't imagine they can harass you with their mark. They just formally made the case that your usage wasn't in the relevant market, and in the case of the US mark, that their usage is somehow substantially different from yours. This will make it nearly impossible for them to now argue your usage is competitive/conflicting. Them taking action would likely have some risk for them; their lawyers would likely advise against it. They probably won't do anything now that they have what they wanted.
More generally: don't treat the lack of registered mark as something you need to act on. You were doing your thing just fine without a registered trademark in the other ~180 countries. Just keep doing what you're doing.
Fighting it will be painful, expensive, stressful and unrewarding. But that doesn't mean you need to go change your name.
This happened to me once, so I guess not so unusual. Our project was called "bitmatch", because it enhanced the OCaml "match" operator to allow matching on bitfields. We didn't apply for a trademark, obviously, as the project was tiny and who does that.
Some US company sued because they held a US trademark for "bitmatch". Luckily they sued my employer (Red Hat) and Red Hat's lawyers dealt with it, but we did have to rename the project to "bitstring" (https://bitstring.software/).
I saw on Reddit, that you already reached out to some people in the OSS space that might have the legal expertise. This actually seems like a very relevant case to me. If a trademark is granted to an open source project, it seems ridiculous to me to apply market based use criteria.
Tbh...use should already be satisfied by having a Github or website and using the registered name.
A lot of posts on HN are about things that should have happened already. Every few days there is a story about a person doing something pretty boring and standard, but they can't because a payment processor or large regulatory body got involved and the computer went "boop boop" and now someone can't have money or continue to invent things. Sorry, pull the slot machine again and see if you get lucky?
Looks like you submitted opposition to their new registration (Deepki) and then they retaliated by applying for cancellation to your existing mark (Deepkit)?
are they actually pursuing use of "Deepkit" or possibly did you just piss them off? Either way, I wouldn't expect to win anything going up these majors. Also, isn't clear there's any tangible benefit even if you were to win appeal.
I read this and the guy saying lawsuits aren't worth it and what's the point? A bigger fish comes by and you are just supposed to flop over and hand them whatever they want unchallenged? Spite at this point would be my biggest motivator.
It's fairly unusual for FLOSS projects to register any trademark, and (despite this lack of strict IP protection) it's also very unusual for the owner of a trademark to ask or require a FLOSS project to change their name because it violates a trademark. Not completely unheard of, but still rare.
I don't know why you decided to trademark your project name, but I think the biggest issue here is that trademark law is naturally the domain of IP rightsholders and an outlook that presumes and enforces scarcity when it comes to names, name spaces, and digital content.
There aren't that many reasons why FLOSS projects need to work within that same domain. My thought is that it is better to try and defend the environment of a digital commons that exists outside of them, than to enter into it and try to participate in a quite alien system of existing IP law, which has a lot of presumptions and standards that, as you say, don't really match the world you work within.
I decided to protect the name because I liked it and wanted to build upon it in the future. Be it OSS, or further commercial offerings.
I hoped to get also protection against corporations that just try to register the name or very similar ones and then decided to get me deleted or sue me for infringements.
In EU it's first to file principle, which means whoever holds the mark, has the right. This means if I would not have registered it, the company could just register "Deepkit" or "Deepki" and sue me to death. Now that I lost the trademark (not totally final, I can appeal), I risk getting sued for having a too similar name - which is exactly what I tried to avoid by having a registered trademark.
Did I make some mistakes with appealing and not collecting enough user data? Likely. Was it too naive from me? Yes.
But I think reasonable and the whole idea behind trademarks is to protect projects like this. I could be wrong though, am not an expert.
If you're talking about apple music vs apple records, they actually got sued over it and they had to sign a licensing agreement with apple records to continue using apple music.
I'm talking about Apple's appeal against a german cafe named Apfelkind (Apple child) trademarking its logo because people could confuse it with Apple's.
The end result of all that fighting over the years was that Apple Computer gained full rights to the mark, and licenses it to Apple Corps for the limited use of identifying Apple Corps and related marks.
You will be asked to prove you have marks to do things like be listed in the app store. You need to prove your identity with third party legal companies that look into your company and the marks you are using. If you don't own those marks you probably won't get your app published.
Many examples come to mind, but basically anytime a FOSS app goes into the app stores, like KDE. In the past we mostly argued about who should be the person that has to act as the app owner etc. or created foundations or other legal entities to bridge this gap.
Look at elementaryOS as well. They attempted to assert rights to marks they don't own and it created a fiasco for them. They are virtually irrelevant now in the Linux space. All of the developers left the project besides one who is struggling with mental illness.
trademark as far as i know is the only form of IP that is actually rivalrous. that is: use by you deprives me of of my use. for example. suppose i started an (independent) mcdonalds restaurant and used their livery and had trashy service and poor customer service and cleanliness, this would damage (real) McDonald's reputation
tldr; Burger King had to rebrand when they expanded into Australia because there was already a Burger King restaurant here. They're still called Hungry Jacks here.
I am sorry to hear that OP, I hope you fight the good fight and wish you all the best.
On a different note, a quick cursory glance of this company really makes me wonder who even gave them $160M? The company site is soulless and filled with corporate jargon, and the whole company smells of bloat and leadership team is a long list of people in bullshit jobs. Is this where VC money goes these days? I am dumbfounded by the degree of mismatch between capital and utility
If they do some decarbonization real estate SaaS and need connections with both regulators or whoever issues certificates and REITs etc, then it makes sense. I don't think they need a lot of software for that.
Well, a cursory glance into the funding round shows an equity firm (Highland Europe) which had one of their partners moved into a director position at Deepski. Could be the guy collecting "AI leadership experience" for his resume.
Another notable investor is a french public entity (bpifrance) which might very well have similar reasons but on the country level, having to allocate funds to "AI" to demonstrate France leading role in future technology.
Note that this doesn't mean Deepski and it's leadership can't be great - but the thought experiment of some well networked people noticing they could all benefit over a glass of wine also doesn't seem too far off.
Edit: Maybe there's an angle for someone really serious about this FOSS dilemma here, I hear public entities really hate bad PR - maybe ask bpifrance how they feel about this?
Trademarks are not worth defending until they are valuable, just pick another one.
Selecting a name that is offensive or unsuitable in some language you don't care about will usually do face no challenge because bigger corporations use consultants who check those things.
I built a $10m revenue company, when we were very small I filed for a trademark in the US during the first year of operation and got rejected (but still on the supplemental registry, which doesn’t do much at all)
Another company applied and had the exact same mark accepted, but in a different industry so not competitive with us.
Honestly it has never been an issue. We have resources now to reapply and pursue the official trademark, but I just see no reason to do so.
IIRC EU trademarks operate on a first come (first applied) priority, so the mark gets granted to whoever applies first. That’s unlike the US where the mark is supposed to be granted to whoever was using the mark first, no matter when the application date is.
TLDR: I’ve spoken to multiple trademark attorneys, have applied for multiple marks, and honestly just don’t see the value in spending time or energy on it for an established company, let alone a side project.
Established company with any kind of brand recognition is definitely worth it, because of the disruption that could be caused by someone getting the trademark before you (e.g. you could be sued for using their trademark, you could lose your web domain, etc).
For a non-established company, no point. I struggle to see the point for an OSS side project, too, unless there are plans to turn it into a paid product at some point in the future.
100% agree, I had a non technical founder for a crypto venture in one of the earlier cycles. He was basically just there to get me in rooms with investors but didn’t know that, any way he kept trying to patent and trademark everything instead of just executing, and I shot him down repeatedly so we could launch the project in 6 months flat
Made millions in revenue just launching and definitely would have missed the window doing IP stuff
I can't give advice about the trademark, other than that I've been through this kind of thing before and it sucks.
What I can say... is that I love what you've been doing on your Deepkit, and I was horrified to hear that this was happening to you.
Seriously, I've only lurked in the community so far, but it's possibly the most forward-thinking foundational library in the web space that I've seen.
Strong typing with annotations that can simultaneously influence runtime ORM and frontend generation, while being fully compliant Typescript? A hand-rolled lightning-fast Typescript compiler that emits the runtime reflection capabilities? Full-fledged DI as an inherent part of the design, not an afterthought?
It's such an incredible blend of beautiful tooling with pragmatic applications.
https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/47658#issueco... provides context on why some of TypeScript's design goals around erasure hold it back from these features. My vision of the web is that it would be an even more vibrant and innovative place if TypeScript were to cast off those restrictions.
DeepKit actually solving this by implementing its own compiler, bytecode, and interpreter... it's truly incredible.
Marc, know that there are people out there who love your work, and who will continue to follow it avidly regardless of the name. You're doing amazing things.
You say your project has thousands of stars on GitHub, right? AFAIK, GitHub makes all stargazers public. And many (most?) users have location data in their GitHub profiles.
Given that, could you not write a script that simply pulls that for every user that's starred your project in the EU, and provide that as evidence?
The EU pushes heavily for consent for tracking, yet you need to track your users locations to keep your trademark, thus requiring that every company has to have a popup asking to track that data.
IANAL, but.... you only need consent if it isn't required for your business to function. If you need to track to maintain your trademark, couldn't you argue any business with a trademark needs to track users?
I'm sure it wouldn't work in a real court, but it sounds funny in my head.
Right, but I think this case is interesting for the developer community as it targets specifically open-source use-cases, where you usually have neither extensive user per-country data, nor would you usually care about tracking, or have commercial offerings. This essentially means that you either cannot protect your open-source project name or have always to keep in mind to collect user per-country data, otherwise you risk getting deleted.
I don't have advice on if you should pursue "the fight" or not.
What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things. I will probably get a lot of flack for it, but an example would be Google with the Go programming language. There was an existing language already developed and being used under that name. Google wanted to call it Go for "bigger" reasons and so they did.
Who is supposed to "fight" that?
In my opinion it's the maintainers of distros and maintainers of repositories. If they want to call their thing "foo" and there is already a "foo" in the repository, that sucks, kick rocks or call yours "foo-company-thing" since you're the one creating issues. You can likewise take the responsibility of explaining to your users why "foo-company-thing" is the name in all of the Internet as a whole. We didn't create those problems and I don't want to spend any of my time "solving" them for free.
> It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.
It's advice I have followed myself and with expense.
> What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?
In this case I would be willing to help the NPM listings stay under his control and all of the other places he is already using the name "deepkit". I would help him expand that footprint if needed. I would help amplify his voice by publishing a blog entry. I don't have a large blog, but adding your voice has value. Right now this company sees this as X risk and Y cost and those numbers are low. If they have an invalid trademark ruling they may be able to force the issue eventually in some places, but don't make it easy for them.
If a prison analogy is needed, it's not what you see in the movies. Nobody shows up to prison and does the whole "fight the biggest guy" because they want to look tough etc. In the real world that gets you stabbed in your sleep. What happens instead is bullies who can and will win the fight in the long run are deterred by having to do the work and move to the weakest targets.
I don't know how much work the adversarial company has budgeted, what they think X or Y are, etc. What I think is important is to raise the cost, which is measured in many ways besides money.
Trademarks mean nothing. A bigger company can always come along and bully you till you give it up. Just like what happened to Allen Pan and his Mythbusters trademark.
What's especially egregious about this case to me is how the authorities didn't seem to even be able to articulate what would satisfy them, other than an overwhelming amount of documented EU commercial activity.
If you had 2 people documented as being in the EU who had purchased software licenses for 'Deepkit' for $10 is that enough? If not, why? Why is being big[1] justification for outright stealing a trademark from someone little? It's gross, is what it is. I'd rather eliminate the whole trademark construct than have it just automatically side with the largest party in any contested case.
[1] also, they may only be 'big' in terms of bank account balance, since they're some startup -- they may not have any EU customers yet themselves. Did they prove they did?
Look, I hate to be that guy, but according to your own comment [1], it sounds like you started this fight when you tried to block them from registering the "Deepki" trademark in the EU.
They were perfectly happy to coexist with your project -- and nobody was going to confuse "Deepkit", a TypeScript framework, with "Deepki", a real estate sustainability platform.
But then you tried to stop them from registering their own name (which they had been using for years before you started your project). Why would you do this? They responded by filing to invalidate your trademark, which, given the circumstances, seems pretty reasonable. In the end, they won.
You say that you registered a trademark so that you could "live peacefully." Perhaps the lesson to learn is if you want to live peacefully, don't go around picking fights.
To be honest, until reaching your comment this seemed like the small guy being bullied by the big bad corporation, but after looking at this, this does seem like the other company was quite polite or reasonable about this, while the small guy wanted really hard to get into a "fight".
What I take from this is, that if a .eu domain, or one of any TLD of an EU country has not page with real usage on it, that I then I can demand to have it cancelled and given the right to register it.
Should be the same, no? And if it's not, why didn't OP get the right to sell the trademark to that company?
Not sure if it's ok or not, what the TM office did there, because if not, then just registering TMs could also be done in the same way like domain squatting.
Maybe OP should find cases where such demands from powerful companies were rejected, even if they shouldn't have rejected them.
IANAL, but I remember a case with a startup where 2 of the founders were lawyers. They found themselves in a similar situation & decided not to fight it, but to use it as an opportunity to rebrand
On the other hand, a startup with $160M may be willing to pay u for a US trademark w/o going to court or arbitration
> On the other hand, a startup with $160M may be willing to pay u for a US trademark w/o going to court or arbitration
Not after this post, they're not. They've already got a US trademark, and if they simply Google it, and find this post, they're going to realize this person is never going to challenge them in a US court over it.
I've written Apache Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Free Software Foundation, and OpenSource Initiative, and asked for help. We will see. If OSS has no value to our law makers and the trademark needs to be deleted, that's fine and I accept the loss. But I'm an open-source contributor since over decade and not only love the spirit, but my whole career is based on it. The last thing I can do is to fight for justice, even if it means I need help from bigger firms/initiatives.
I can understand why you're frustrated if you feel like you've lost something, but trademarks serve a purpose for facilitating commercial trade. That isn't an attack on everything in the world that isn't non-commercial.
Nobody told you that you can't use the name, right? And you've still got a US mark, don't you? How is any of this harming your project or your career? ... or more importantly, how is this hurting consumers? Consumer protections are the entire legal reason for granting a trademark.
I mean, you can certainly fight their registration. I just don't know what you or your users would actually get out of it?
Trademarks serve the same purpose for free goods and services as they do for paid ones. It's just that giving things away for free is rare.
If setting your usage price to $0 means no trademark, that's a pretty big attack on non-commercial services. Alternatively if it's more about tracking, that's also quite bad in a different way.
Yes, but ultimately trademarks are a consumer protection, and what matters in granting a trademark is protecting consumers from harm.
I don't know much about this OSS project... but if there's a case that they need this trademark to protect consumers from harm, then that's your winning argument.
> If setting your usage price to $0 means no trademark, that's a pretty big attack on non-commercial services.
If you really are not doing commerce, trademarks are irrelevant. You can't get one, and you don't need one.
> Yes, but ultimately trademarks are a consumer protection, and what matters in granting a trademark is protecting consumers from harm.
Yes, protecting consumers. And people are equally consumers of something whether they pay $1 or $0.
> but if there's a case that they need this trademark to protect consumers from harm, then that's your winning argument.
Other than the normal argument for trademark and the evidence of use they had? If you have to show a specific argument for harm, that's way too high of a bar.
> If you really are not doing commerce, trademarks are irrelevant. You can't get one, and you don't need one.
Define "commerce" here.
If we count competing in the market but your product happens to be $0 as commerce, then sure I can agree but this project passes the test.
If a price of $0 disqualifies you from "commerce" then no way, trademarks are not irrelevant and you do still need one. Consumers need to be able to find your product and avoid imitators.
No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else. And if you're not, then you don't qualify for a trademark because trademarks are marks that you get to use when you do trade.
I am not asking for the evidence of what that commerce is. I personally do not care nor do I make the judgment of what qualifies.
But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.
And if you're not going to do any trade, then you don't need to worry about it. Because you cannot infringe on a trademark without doing trade.
> No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else.
Okay cool, glad we're on the same page there, but then I don't understand why you even made your initial comment saying "I can understand why you're frustrated if you feel like you've lost something, but trademarks serve a purpose for facilitating commercial trade."
By your definition, they are engaged in commercial trade. And that was well-documented in the initial post.
> But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.
And the issue is the trademark office is not taking their evidence. They're looking at hundreds of thousands of downloads and saying "hmmmm, might be 99% non-EU, we don't care"
That is what fascinates me the most. The basic assumptions of everything I presented was non-EU. Somewhat annoying, but seeing it objectively, I think it was a skill issue on my lawyers side. They should have said to me "Marc, look, we need hard proof. Ask your fucking users on twitter, on github, an discord, we need a list of X users confirming they are from the EU and use this thing". I believe in good-will on the EU side, that they interpret data in a positive way in my favor - but the exact opposite happened.
> And that was well-documented in the initial post.
I mean, there was some documentation. I don't know if it was well documented.
There's like 160 million reasons why the other company has better documentation.
Ultimately, the a point of holding a trademark is to give you some legal firepower. Going up against the company with $160 million, you're pretty much screwed anyway.
Their best bet in this scenario is to just use the name anyway and not piss them off. There are plenty of organizations, even very for-profit companies, that use the same name and don't have any problem with it because it's not confusing anybody or pissing anyone off.
Following this logic, does this mean if I have a project name like ABC, and some company decided to incorporate in this name plus registering the trademark, I have to give up the name when they decide to come after me? Like I have a github.com/ABC, a npmjs.com/org/ABC. All just gone, because trademarks right gives them the right, and I have nothing that protects me?
If that is the case, ok. It's just that I was naive enough to believe I could protect my little open-source project from this using a trademark. The EUPIO somewhat confirmed in their writing that you don't need commercial activities, but you need "genuine use", which is, again, hard to prove if you don't collect user data.
If I consume a good or service then I’m a consumer, whether I had to pay for that good/service or not. As a consumer, it is in my interest that I can look up the name of the good or service and not have confusion as to which good/service I’m obtaining.
Yep. And if someone uses OPs mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services, then they have the right to sue them.
I don't know about the EU, but in the US a registered mark only gives you the presumption that's valid. But those presumptions can be challenged in court.
Of course, if you can't prove to the examiners that you even have a right to the mark, you're probably gonna have one snowball's chance in hell of a time proving that someone else's use of it is invalid in court.
Trademarks are for commerce, no? If you had charged even a few customers would it have helped?
Now that they own the trademark you can't make money off of it but you don't have to give anything up - if you have the url and aren't charging anyone you can hold onto it.
> I dealt with this years ago - it would have been about $250K to challenge the trademark for something that I'd been using for a few years.
I think your mistake here was that you registered the TM but it was not linked to any business, therefore you lost it, which is expected outcome(irregardless of how you feel about it). If you would create a non-profit organisation that would own it, you'd be bulletproof.
(Sounds like the EU equivalent of cases that Larry Lessig and the EFF would take in the US; have you contacted them?)
Try to find open-source/startup-friendly MEPs, and for Bulgaria. And start blogging on LinkedIn. And mention your domain (deepkit.io) early and often. All publicity is good publicity. And present at the European open-source confs. Start making noise. Maybe you can't reverse your individual ruling (or maybe you can), but you can alert others.
> - They basically kept repeating that they couldn't clearly link any of the usage to the specific goods/services my trademark was registered for.
I don't get what they're claiming hits on your domain (deepkit.io) don't already show. Sounds bogus. They didn't cite any specific examples of what would have proven it?
It sounds like another case of the favoritism given to commercial activity (and more favoritism the larger the scale of that activity). It's similar to how you can do various things and take various tax writeoffs if you do something as a business, but if you just do the same things without being a business, you're SOL.
No, I started to rename the repo and moved it to my personal account, out of frustration mainly. Not sure yet what the new name is going to be, or if I can keep the old one.
Well, logically you should be able to keep the old name because you have documented proof that your user base in EU is small enough that this should NOT cause any confusions between your name and the new trademark holder. Just keep the cancellation documents as proof that you use this name but not in EU.
This is their claim and not yours, right? The other possibility is that if you have enough users in EU you should also keep the trademark. Only one of these can be true?
Also note that I already lost some court cases using my logic.
Condolences on this nonsense. Sounds like that company's actions are also causing anguish, and I hope a nice bulldog lawyer can help with that facet of the situation.
Sounds like the EUIPO isn't following its own rules. I wonder if there might be some corruption going on that might be addressed. It's certainly a ridiculous and dangerous ruling.
Did they actually try and hijack their identity? Hijack to me implies actively trying to steal their reputation. Sounds more like the name wasn't particularly unique and they independently decided they wanted to use that name.
- They started as small firm in France, registered there the trademark Deepki, unrelated to software.
- I created Deepkit around 2018, trademarked in US and EU with software category.
- They raised substantial amount of money around 2022 $150M
- Board/Shareholders likely decided that the brand is important
- They tried to register the US brand under software category. The USPTO declined automatically because of "likelihood of confusion"
- They reached out to me wanting a "Consent and Coexistence Agreement", I told them not for free, to which they never responded with an offer.
- They tried to register in EU later, which I tried to block under the same "likelihood of confusion" ground.
- They started fighting with legal terms to get my brand deleted.
- They succeeded.
It's not necessarily only their fault that the trademark is gone now. As I just learned, the EU requires very strict rules of proving you have legit users. I couldn't convince them. Maybe due to skill issues, missing data, or technicalities. The biggest danger is now though that they can get me deleted from the internet entirely once the protection is gone. It requires just one corporation to decide to start come after you with a cancellation process, and you are done.
So, you would spend several thousands of dollars to register a trademark to protect it from other corporations, and then the first thing you would do is give out the right to said corporation for 1000 bucks? I'm not an expert, but that sounds like a bad deal to me and substantially weakens the mark.
Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable, and OP just experienced FAFO for trying to extort them.
> Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable
What kind of world do you live in?
It's no more reasonable for a product to trade under "Deepki" in the presence of the established mark "Deepkit" than it would be to name a school "Stamford University".
No, according to the EU there is no documentation that any of "hundreds of thousands" of users are located in the EU.
In neither case is it relevant to the idea that it is "reasonable" for Deepki to desire to use their mark in coexistence with the mark "Deepkit". Your argument is that they didn't want coexistence because the other mark didn't exist.
No, initially they tried to trademark "Deepki" in the US. It was not me blocking that, the USPTO itself decided to block the application on the grounds of "likelihood of confusion" to which Deepki could have appealed, but they did not. I assume it's so blatantly similar, that even the USPTO clerk decided to block it right from the start.
I understand for the US trademark, I'm asking about the EU trademark. If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.
I'm not claiming their response is any better, but I don't know anything about trademark issuance in the EU so I won't speak on that.
> If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.
IANAL and dont really know, but my understanding is many places require you to defend it in order to keep it. If you become aware of something and fail to try and block it, that can be viewed as you've lost interest in the trademark and result in it being taken away from you.
They have all the money and there's nothing you can do about it. But that's what we love here on HN! VC and billionaires, corporations and executives!
As long as we get our highish salaries, our taxes don't rise and we can live in a nice neighbourhood away from the poor then we literally don't care about wealth accumulation, abuses of corporate power or lobbying.
Sure, pretend it's not true; but we've not done anything about it, we're not doing anything about it, and we're not going to do anything about it.
The best outcome, if they’re going to strong-arm it from you anyway, is to sell it to them.
Talk to a lawyer about optimal pricing, then offer to sell them the trademark for a decent discount versus what their strong-arm tactic will cost them (they have to pay lawyers too!)
The company wants your trademark for the lowest price. Just be cheaper than what they have to pay to legally steal it.
I guess you’ve fallen foul of the rules to protect against trademark “squatting”. They surely weren’t designed with (non-commercial) OSS projects in mind.
Rename your project, and use your established SEO of the trademark to tell the your story. You aren't going to win, but at least make them lose a bit too.
I haven't seen anything that mentions that trademarks are business classification specific. See Apple Corporation (the computer company) vs. Apple Corp (The Beatles holding company) for example.
Deepki is in a very different space to Deepkit (Although the former is a terrible brand name, and the latter sounds more related to deep learning).
Does an OSS project that doesn't trade have a classification? I have no idea.
For a monthly fee, you can have “users as a service”. You will receive traffic from many, many users, who you can freely harvest all the data you want from and prove you have traffic. These users will not block analytics or any trackers, and are fully ready to be data mined.
Subscription tiers scale based on how many users you require.
Did you come first in time before the Deepki company? If so you probably have the ability to win. First in time wins, even if you were a small player. It would be their responsibility not to choose a project with a similar name to what you have if you came first.
This is yet another example of how utterly disingenuous the stated purpose of intellectual property laws are. There's all this talk from proponents about how it protects the little guys from abuse by big corporations, yet in reality it's the exact opposite every single time. Rights are taken away from the public with the force of the law while big businesses trample on the law to steal from individuals. For all the talk here about the best course of action being to "just" give in, things will keep getting progressively worse until there is collective action.
I would be inclined to agree in the case of trademark squatting, but I fail to see how it can be squatting if the "squatter" owned the trademark since before the squatee existed. That just doesn't really make sense.
While I think there's very little chance for the author to overturn this decision, and thus agree with you that he should just move on, you should have a look at the amount of features this small project offers. I don't think this could be considered "trademark squatting", there's a real effort put in that project, and for many years.
Perhaps I have the wrong idea of what it means to do trademark squatting, or did I misunderstand your point?
They were not using it commercially (if I understood correctly) and that was not the point of dispute. The point of this post is that under EU regulations free software can be trademarked, but as there is no reason or payment info to track locations of its users, it could not prove that it was actually used within the EU. The evidence issue was about the location of the users and whether an FOSS project in the EU can realistically have a trademark based on the rules that supposedly allow it to have.
The problem is that this way it seems like an impossible battle. Even if you get location data of stuff like downloads (which is not sth you normally get if for example one clones the repo anyway), you cannot prove the software is actually used, unless you use analytics in the software itself. This sounds important for FOSS in the EU.
https://www.deepki.com/about/#certifications-awards
>Deepki holds the label BCorp certification, thereby strengthening its commitment towards its communities and stakeholders.
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/standards/complaints/
>B Lab will investigate material, credible, and specific claims against a current B Corp in one of the two following categories:
> 2. Breaches of the B Corp Community's core values as expressed in our Declaration of Interdependence.
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
>B CORP DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE
>As Certified B Corporations and leaders of this emerging economy, we believe:
> That we must be the change we seek in the world.
> That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
> That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
> To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.
Good find. Might be worth to read this and consider filing a complaint. Seems pretty clear they are in violation of BCorp values: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/standards/complaints/
If it's worth it. OP needs to decide.
BCorp is just virtual signaling. There is no reason for small business or startup to be Bcorp
The expression is virtue signaling, not virtual
I had always assumed this was one of those labels that you go away and buy for a large sum of money when you've been caught doing something bad
For those big corps, the large sum of money is mostly hiring consultants to fill the paperwork needed to pass the certification
But what I see here in France is mostly young companies getting certified as a proof of them being built better than the big ones that they are competing with
For instance, most of the new IT consultancoies are B Corp certified and promote it a lot, even though they work for the same customers as the big old ones
So now there are companies that are getting rid of their B Corp cert because they say it lost its meaning and being BCC is getting more and more a sign of being a bad company doing virtue signaling
Overall I think that business certifications can't work above a certain scale, because then they become just a hoop that needs to be addressed and not an actual engagement leading every business decisions.
Is it possible to report B corps not working in accordance with the principles?
I wrote B corps an email highlighting the issue and asking if this actions align with their principles.
They seem to be very busy. It seems showing that your corporation accompanies positive social impact, fairness, and responsibility is in high demand.
> Thank you for reaching out and for you interest in the B Corp Movement! Despite our high ambition for an inclusive, equitable and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet; we are still a small team. So kindly allow us to come back to you within 2-3 weeks
> Due to a high level of inquiries recently, it may take us longer than usual to respond to your message. We will answer questions in the order received. Response times may be up to 2 weeks.
Yes
What an absolute piece of trash company
Having bought a trademark in the EU and the US for an open-source project as well (with the US being denied). It sucks, it's a waste of time and money, and my advice is to not bother.
None of the 'normal' eventualities are all that scary or bad.
If a trademark holder asks you to change your name, just change your name - your users don't care as much as you. If done well, you can milk a name change into getting more attention to your project.
If it's a name you've used longer than them and are really attached to, you could gamble and just keep using it - all a trademark does is let them recover costs IFF they can prove your claim of use it is false and harmful by being in the same category.
Lawsuits really aren't the fun kind of thing a 150m dollar company wants to get entangled in, especially held in unfamiliar foreign courts they might lose - unless maybe you go around attacking their trademark.
Walk away.
Life is too short for lawsuits.
This comes from someone who dated someone for three years who was in a lawsuit when I got to know them, and was still in a lawsuit when we split. It affected them daily, hundreds and hundreds of hours were lost, thousands and thousands of dollars went to a nice, well-intended family lawyer.
But the best advice they could have got:
When given the chance, walk away.
Life is too short for lawsuits.
I’m almost 100% in agreement, but context matters, and attitude matters.
If you’re up against a behemoth, figure out how to get out ASAP.
But I’ve learned that small claims lawsuits can actually be quite fun! Earlier this year I sued a former landlord in small claims court. He had entered my rented space while I was away (without notice, multiple times) and then refused to return my security deposit when I moved out.
I went into it with a “let’s have fun and learn” attitude. I had never sued someone and I’d never represented myself in court. I read a lot, had some good conversations with LLMs (and then fact-checked them!) about the laws and case history in my area, then filed my suit.
After he dodged the summons three times, I discovered I could file a motion for alternative service (post on his front door, post in a newspaper, etc). When I went to court to argue for that motion, he actually showed up in court! So I asked the judge if he could be served right there, and he was!
Our trial was highly entertaining, I caught him in a bald-faced lie, then looked at the judge and said I’m not sure how both of these things he said could be true, I can’t figure out how it adds up but maybe you can.
I won the case, the judge awarded me less than I was asking for, but more than I was actually owed.
I was kinda hoping he would not pay (that’s common) in which case I was looking forward to learning about how to garnish his wages or put a lien on his property. But he’s actually paying me in monthly installments for the next very many months. He could pay me all at once so he’s being a bit of a jerk, but at least he’s paying.
All-in-all, I knew I had a solid case, had fun along the way, and didn’t spend more than a few bucks on court fees. In that specific context, it made sense for me and I’m happy I did it.
You are lucky that the incident caught you just when you were ripe for a new hobby.
> Please tell us about the time you, cobbzilla, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage
> So I made my landlord pay me rent, with the help of some LLMs....
> I was kinda hoping he would not pay (that’s common) in which case I was looking forward to learning about how to garnish his wages or put a lien on his property.
If he has assets to his name and the action was against him, I don’t see him doing that. In most countries you can hire private recovery, so the process will be very fast to collect.
A good friend of mine always used to say "Once the lawyers are involved, you lose no matter what. Only the lawyers win." (paraphrased from memory).
I don't know if I agree that that is correct every single time, but it strikes me as a very useful heuristic at the least.
"Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons, I've got em 'cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they screw everything up."
Danny DeVito
My wife is a lawyer so I collect amusing statements about them ;-)
The way I've heard it phrased is: billable hours always wins.
That's a very good saying. I keep that in mind.
This has always been my (albeit limited) experience.
This is the side of lawsuits that you don’t see every time someone on Reddit or Hacker News confidently tells you to lawyer up and go to court.
Even seemingly simple issues can turn into never ending money pits that consume thousands of hours of your life spread over months or years.
If you’re really committed to something then you should evaluate how much time and money you’re willing to put into pursuing it. Unless both of those values are uncomfortably high numbers, just move on.
Which is exactly what those individuals and companies who act in bad faith but have deep pockets rely on. You’re right, but it’s still unfortunate.
Depends on your philosophy, honestly. If you're a hedonist, then yeah, get free from lawsuits as soon as possible and go back to munching candy. If you're am altruist, throwing yourself into the lion's den to eventually effect social good might be smart. If you're a nihilist, you can pick either, it's all the same when the sun goes supernova.
> it's all the same when the sun goes supernova.
We're already all dead in geologic time. Make the biggest ripples in the pond.
So... sue everyone you can?
And hire someone to sue yourself!
One alternative is to create a website that outs the company that is harming you in a way that is non-libelous and just tells your story, and then focus fully on SEO and GEO to ensure that the other company sees your site front-and-center when searching for their own.
You may get more attention this way, because it can affect the company more than the optics of a legal dispute. It’s not revenge, and you shouldn’t have that intent, if you want it to work.
However this method, and other similar methods used in the U.S. such as filing BBB complaints, are mostly used for harm done to consumers rather than businesses affected by disputes, so it may not be the best advice.
I empathise with the advice, even aspire to it. Despite that, I abhor a bully getting away with being a bully and would feel discontent not putting up a fight on principle.
In meditation, we learn to let go.
Attachment is discontent.
Tangential, but I’ve always found this hard to understand. Surely the things you value are worth hanging on to/fighting for?
> Surely the things you value are worth hanging on to/fighting for?
Maybe. For me at least, the art is in what you choose to value in different contexts, rather than in absolute terms. Thinking about this specific case, I might value my own peace of mind, money, and time much more highly than justice or retribution.
Other times, something we value is taken from us and living in the past, spending our days wishing for it, etc. can prevent us from "moving on". It can become an anchor or baggage.
The cultures I'm aware of that practice meditation value letting go of the things that keep you attached to physical existence, because they're looking forward to a spiritual existence that value more highly.
For my part, I feel that there's value in critically examining parts of your life and deciding what really matters. If something matters, fight for it. If it turns out something didn't, or it doesn't any more, let it go so you can make room in your life for more important things.
In the entire history of the world, not one single thing ever got better by accepting something as it is.
"You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
- Dune, the gom jabbar's test for humanity
In this particular case, do you advocate the individual fight it to the bitter end? Or should they just walk away?
Just because one ignores something, does not mean they've let it go.
> Just because one ignores something, does not mean they've let it go.
To ignore something means choosing not to notice, acknowledge, or respond to it — even though you’re aware it exists.
Choose peace or violence. Violence doesn't have to mean physical destruction or harm, it can mean self psychological harm as you put aside your comfort to further a goal or your values.
Peace is a perfectly valid option for people to pick. If they can master it, they can weather any depredation the world throws at them. Which may be many if society continues to slip slide into fascism.
However I believe most good things in the world came at the behest of violence - again not necessarily physical, but at minimum people sacrificing personal peace. Woman's suffrage, black suffrage in America, the civil rights act, LGBT rights in the UK, the overthrow of the kmt military dictatorship in Taiwan. Endless examples.
I'm still thinking about this all the time, I wrote about it a while back: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/accept-or-reject/
> However I believe most good things in the world came at the behest of violence - again not necessarily physical, but at minimum people sacrificing personal peace. Woman's suffrage, black suffrage in America, the civil rights act, LGBT rights in the UK, the overthrow of the kmt military dictatorship in Taiwan. Endless examples.
Absolutely. I would further assert that path of least resistance is very often not the right one. The art, as I think you imply, is in "knowing" when to pick up a fight and persist, vs. when not.
> The art, as I think you imply, is in "knowing" when to pick up a fight and persist, vs. when not.
I think you're right on this, and if I implied it I think it's because that's where my thoughts have been heading without me realizing it.
When I wrote that blog post I was still in a mindset of "expend maximum effort at all costs." A new review strategy of my day to day and month to month life made me realize that this way of doing things wasn't making me more effective, just leading to peaks and troughs.
I've recently accepted that energy is a finite resource that needs to be recharged. Practically, that meant I needed to figure out what costs my energy and what renews it, and as I plan my days and weeks, schedule around this paradigm.
I think my activism is one of those things that's trickier because it energizes to an extent because it actualizes my values, but also it's tremendously energy draining because it takes time and huge amounts of willpower to do any given action - like overcoming my poor local language ability and nervousness to confront an illegally parked car blocking pedestrians.
So that's another aspect of this peace vs violence dynamic you've got me thinking about in a new light - yes, you need to choose your battles, if nothing else temporaly so you can put the battle at a time you'll have the energy to deal with it.
Life is too short for far more things than just this. It always strikes me just how much time we waste on stuff we won't care about in one year or five. Myself included. Time is by far our most precious commodity.
Everything we do right now is going to be dust in the wind given enough time, including ourselves.
I think we're just trying to keep busy on this lonely planet amist all these stars.
At the end, the only thing that ever matters is the good we tried to do and the love we shared between ourselves and strangers.
> At the end, the only thing that ever matters is the good we tried to do
But even this doesn't matter. If all goes to dust, even the good we do or the love we share. If we do evil, or if we hate the strangers, it makes no difference. We might as well do that if it satisfies us.
This is a philosophy, or "opinion", and should not be confused with truth. If the world was 100% evil people and beings, across all of history, forever, the present would look very different than it does now. And none of us know what the future holds.
lovely said! I think that's the right way to see things. somewhat forces me to give up on the mark, because nobody and nothing really cares about that in a few weeks, if not even days. On the other side, among the good things that you share while you are on this planes is making sure we live in justice. And I can't stop thinking about this being injustice. I could be entirely wrong though.
"thousands of dollars went to a nice, well-intended family lawyer"
Sounds like it was maybe about custody for children?
Then it is hard to walk away, I think. What to do, if the other party does not cooperate and you still want to see your children?
Best advice for both sides still is obviously, avoid the need for lawyers in the first place and maintain basic level of communication.
Lawsuits in Europe are not as expensive as in the US, and they are a good learning experience as well.
I suppose this, again, depends on the country. They can get very expensive, especially if you're in a "loser pays" country. And a judge may even then divide the costs more fairly, and you find that your lawyer costs exceeded the monetary value of the judgement you won. That on top of potentially stressing years and years about it.
And then the loser may request a next level court to consider the case, potentially leading to more stressful years and a lot of additional financial risk.
Couldn’t agree more.
Besides money and hours, it will also affect your psychological wellbeing as it will dominate your mind every day.
Not worth it.
Indeed.
We met her ex once randomly on the street, and the first thing he asked was if she was still in her lawsuit.
Since the other part in the lawsuit lived in another part of the same house, you became paranoid about whether they would hear what you said through the walls, and you would be made painfully aware of the conflict every morning on the way to work.
It felt like a curse.
I would never wish for anyone to end up in a lawsuit.
That’s like Danny DeVito’s speech in War of the Roses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5XfYTgm4x8 (that’s only part of a longer scene, where he basically tells the guy not to proceed).
Similar to this advice, don't ask us.
This whole thread is a question for a lawyer.
But for real...just change the name of your project. It sucks, but the ruling was handed down, you lost the dispute.
Nobody's going to mind that the name changed. Firefox used to be called Firebird and changed due to trademark disputes. Dozens of open source projects have changed their names when they forked off of a corporate project, like LibreOffice and MariaDB.
I know that OP may be fond of the name but it's just a name.
> Firefox used to be called Firebird and changed due to trademark disputes.
It was first called Phoenix, then a trademark dispute forced them to rebrand to Firebird, then a trademark dispute forced them off that name too. Firefox was the third public name for that project. I'm surprised they didn't also get sued by Clint Eastwood[1] and have to change again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film)
Trademark rights are limited based on the category of goods or services. The Phoenix and Firebird disputes were with software companies.
There was a computer game by that name based on the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(video_game)
Can't agree more. Change your name to tikpeed and move on!
This name is perfect. I hope this gets traction.
Don't forget the greatest enemy of both abusive companies and abusive government: the news media. And this definitely seems big enough for them.
See if you can "shop" around (start local) to see who's interested in publishing a story something along the lines of "The EU has declared war on small businesses. I'm being forced to pay thousands of euros because a brand-new company decided they wanted to steal my years-old project name."
The news media is abusive companies. Some of the worst. And they are one of the largest beneficiaries and supporters of abusive government, like how they are attempting (and sometimes succeeding) at getting governments to shake down companies who link to their sites. That's not to say they aren't sometimes the enemy of other abusive companies or governments, but that's purely incidental and transactional in cases where it goes against them.
> Don't forget the greatest enemy of both abusive companies and abusive government: the news media. And this definitely seems big enough for them.
Bad publicity is still publicity.
Wealthy US startup steals EU trademark is a sticky title
It’s not a US startup, it’s UK according to the website.
"Wealthy startup steals EU trademark" still works as most will fill in the blank with US.
Unicorn startup bullies small EU company by stealing their trademark - and the gov allows it!
Even better for clickbait: "Wealthy Brexit startup steals EU trademark".
Still, not EU (currently).
Maybe append “venture backed” at the beginning.
the news media is made of megacorps.
In America sure. In Europe public service broadcasting makes up a significant amount of the news media, and much of the rest is regulated.
I saw you may rename your project. IANAL, but don't do that. They might have invalidated a European registered trademark, but you have first use and continuous worldwide use which means a lot. Not all trademarks need to be registered. Again, IANAL, but I can't imagine they can harass you with their mark. They just formally made the case that your usage wasn't in the relevant market, and in the case of the US mark, that their usage is somehow substantially different from yours. This will make it nearly impossible for them to now argue your usage is competitive/conflicting. Them taking action would likely have some risk for them; their lawyers would likely advise against it. They probably won't do anything now that they have what they wanted.
More generally: don't treat the lack of registered mark as something you need to act on. You were doing your thing just fine without a registered trademark in the other ~180 countries. Just keep doing what you're doing.
Fighting it will be painful, expensive, stressful and unrewarding. But that doesn't mean you need to go change your name.
This happened to me once, so I guess not so unusual. Our project was called "bitmatch", because it enhanced the OCaml "match" operator to allow matching on bitfields. We didn't apply for a trademark, obviously, as the project was tiny and who does that.
Some US company sued because they held a US trademark for "bitmatch". Luckily they sued my employer (Red Hat) and Red Hat's lawyers dealt with it, but we did have to rename the project to "bitstring" (https://bitstring.software/).
I saw on Reddit, that you already reached out to some people in the OSS space that might have the legal expertise. This actually seems like a very relevant case to me. If a trademark is granted to an open source project, it seems ridiculous to me to apply market based use criteria.
Tbh...use should already be satisfied by having a Github or website and using the registered name.
Keep us posted.
> use should already be satisfied
A lot of posts on HN are about things that should have happened already. Every few days there is a story about a person doing something pretty boring and standard, but they can't because a payment processor or large regulatory body got involved and the computer went "boop boop" and now someone can't have money or continue to invent things. Sorry, pull the slot machine again and see if you get lucky?
Looks like you submitted opposition to their new registration (Deepki) and then they retaliated by applying for cancellation to your existing mark (Deepkit)?
are they actually pursuing use of "Deepkit" or possibly did you just piss them off? Either way, I wouldn't expect to win anything going up these majors. Also, isn't clear there's any tangible benefit even if you were to win appeal.
I read this and the guy saying lawsuits aren't worth it and what's the point? A bigger fish comes by and you are just supposed to flop over and hand them whatever they want unchallenged? Spite at this point would be my biggest motivator.
I think the whole point of living in the EU is that it's supposed to protect you from exactly this nonsense (e.g. more money wins).
It's a bit disturbing that that doesn't appear to be true any more.
With a llm you can get very far away
It's fairly unusual for FLOSS projects to register any trademark, and (despite this lack of strict IP protection) it's also very unusual for the owner of a trademark to ask or require a FLOSS project to change their name because it violates a trademark. Not completely unheard of, but still rare.
I don't know why you decided to trademark your project name, but I think the biggest issue here is that trademark law is naturally the domain of IP rightsholders and an outlook that presumes and enforces scarcity when it comes to names, name spaces, and digital content.
There aren't that many reasons why FLOSS projects need to work within that same domain. My thought is that it is better to try and defend the environment of a digital commons that exists outside of them, than to enter into it and try to participate in a quite alien system of existing IP law, which has a lot of presumptions and standards that, as you say, don't really match the world you work within.
> decided to trademark your project name
I decided to protect the name because I liked it and wanted to build upon it in the future. Be it OSS, or further commercial offerings.
I hoped to get also protection against corporations that just try to register the name or very similar ones and then decided to get me deleted or sue me for infringements.
In EU it's first to file principle, which means whoever holds the mark, has the right. This means if I would not have registered it, the company could just register "Deepkit" or "Deepki" and sue me to death. Now that I lost the trademark (not totally final, I can appeal), I risk getting sued for having a too similar name - which is exactly what I tried to avoid by having a registered trademark.
Did I make some mistakes with appealing and not collecting enough user data? Likely. Was it too naive from me? Yes. But I think reasonable and the whole idea behind trademarks is to protect projects like this. I could be wrong though, am not an expert.
Too similar a name also only matters if you're in the same space and there is "risk of confusion" with customers
Tell that Apple
If you're talking about apple music vs apple records, they actually got sued over it and they had to sign a licensing agreement with apple records to continue using apple music.
I'm talking about Apple's appeal against a german cafe named Apfelkind (Apple child) trademarking its logo because people could confuse it with Apple's.
Judge for yourself
https://scr.wfcdn.de/6759/Apple-vs.-Apfelkind-1319197155-0-0...
The end result of all that fighting over the years was that Apple Computer gained full rights to the mark, and licenses it to Apple Corps for the limited use of identifying Apple Corps and related marks.
I suspect that they had Apple Cinemas in mind: https://www.theverge.com/news/758192/apple-cinemas-lawsuit-r...
If you keep the US trademark, they might eventually give up on the EU one.
Or .. maybe you could sell it to them or use it as a lever to get the EU one.
I'll never pass up the opportunity to remind that Ryan Dahl is still fighting the good fight against Oracle: https://x.com/rough__sea/status/1953335245412946327
https://deno.com/blog?tag=freejavascript
I disagree.
You will be asked to prove you have marks to do things like be listed in the app store. You need to prove your identity with third party legal companies that look into your company and the marks you are using. If you don't own those marks you probably won't get your app published.
Many examples come to mind, but basically anytime a FOSS app goes into the app stores, like KDE. In the past we mostly argued about who should be the person that has to act as the app owner etc. or created foundations or other legal entities to bridge this gap.
Look at elementaryOS as well. They attempted to assert rights to marks they don't own and it created a fiasco for them. They are virtually irrelevant now in the Linux space. All of the developers left the project besides one who is struggling with mental illness.
trademark as far as i know is the only form of IP that is actually rivalrous. that is: use by you deprives me of of my use. for example. suppose i started an (independent) mcdonalds restaurant and used their livery and had trashy service and poor customer service and cleanliness, this would damage (real) McDonald's reputation
relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Jack%27s
tldr; Burger King had to rebrand when they expanded into Australia because there was already a Burger King restaurant here. They're still called Hungry Jacks here.
There is a related, interesting legal battle over JavaScript trademark.
I think that it might be a good idea to flagpole an OSS trademark just in case some bozos come and spoil the fun
https://deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle3
I am sorry to hear that OP, I hope you fight the good fight and wish you all the best.
On a different note, a quick cursory glance of this company really makes me wonder who even gave them $160M? The company site is soulless and filled with corporate jargon, and the whole company smells of bloat and leadership team is a long list of people in bullshit jobs. Is this where VC money goes these days? I am dumbfounded by the degree of mismatch between capital and utility
If they do some decarbonization real estate SaaS and need connections with both regulators or whoever issues certificates and REITs etc, then it makes sense. I don't think they need a lot of software for that.
Well, a cursory glance into the funding round shows an equity firm (Highland Europe) which had one of their partners moved into a director position at Deepski. Could be the guy collecting "AI leadership experience" for his resume.
Another notable investor is a french public entity (bpifrance) which might very well have similar reasons but on the country level, having to allocate funds to "AI" to demonstrate France leading role in future technology.
Note that this doesn't mean Deepski and it's leadership can't be great - but the thought experiment of some well networked people noticing they could all benefit over a glass of wine also doesn't seem too far off.
Edit: Maybe there's an angle for someone really serious about this FOSS dilemma here, I hear public entities really hate bad PR - maybe ask bpifrance how they feel about this?
> I am dumbfounded by the degree of mismatch between capital and utility
That's often a sign of money laundering
Trademarks are not worth defending until they are valuable, just pick another one.
Selecting a name that is offensive or unsuitable in some language you don't care about will usually do face no challenge because bigger corporations use consultants who check those things.
Rumpa, or Billen would be a good name.
I agree.
I built a $10m revenue company, when we were very small I filed for a trademark in the US during the first year of operation and got rejected (but still on the supplemental registry, which doesn’t do much at all)
Another company applied and had the exact same mark accepted, but in a different industry so not competitive with us.
Honestly it has never been an issue. We have resources now to reapply and pursue the official trademark, but I just see no reason to do so.
IIRC EU trademarks operate on a first come (first applied) priority, so the mark gets granted to whoever applies first. That’s unlike the US where the mark is supposed to be granted to whoever was using the mark first, no matter when the application date is.
TLDR: I’ve spoken to multiple trademark attorneys, have applied for multiple marks, and honestly just don’t see the value in spending time or energy on it for an established company, let alone a side project.
Established company with any kind of brand recognition is definitely worth it, because of the disruption that could be caused by someone getting the trademark before you (e.g. you could be sued for using their trademark, you could lose your web domain, etc).
For a non-established company, no point. I struggle to see the point for an OSS side project, too, unless there are plans to turn it into a paid product at some point in the future.
I wrote a story about how this plays out, 10 years ago, still relevant: https://startupnews.com.au/news/the-buildkite-story/
100% agree, I had a non technical founder for a crypto venture in one of the earlier cycles. He was basically just there to get me in rooms with investors but didn’t know that, any way he kept trying to patent and trademark everything instead of just executing, and I shot him down repeatedly so we could launch the project in 6 months flat
Made millions in revenue just launching and definitely would have missed the window doing IP stuff
I can't give advice about the trademark, other than that I've been through this kind of thing before and it sucks.
What I can say... is that I love what you've been doing on your Deepkit, and I was horrified to hear that this was happening to you.
Seriously, I've only lurked in the community so far, but it's possibly the most forward-thinking foundational library in the web space that I've seen.
Strong typing with annotations that can simultaneously influence runtime ORM and frontend generation, while being fully compliant Typescript? A hand-rolled lightning-fast Typescript compiler that emits the runtime reflection capabilities? Full-fledged DI as an inherent part of the design, not an afterthought?
It's such an incredible blend of beautiful tooling with pragmatic applications.
For anyone curious about this, https://web.archive.org/web/20230916074647/https://deepkit.i... is a fascinating read.
https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/47658#issueco... provides context on why some of TypeScript's design goals around erasure hold it back from these features. My vision of the web is that it would be an even more vibrant and innovative place if TypeScript were to cast off those restrictions.
DeepKit actually solving this by implementing its own compiler, bytecode, and interpreter... it's truly incredible.
Marc, know that there are people out there who love your work, and who will continue to follow it avidly regardless of the name. You're doing amazing things.
You say your project has thousands of stars on GitHub, right? AFAIK, GitHub makes all stargazers public. And many (most?) users have location data in their GitHub profiles.
Given that, could you not write a script that simply pulls that for every user that's starred your project in the EU, and provide that as evidence?
The EU pushes heavily for consent for tracking, yet you need to track your users locations to keep your trademark, thus requiring that every company has to have a popup asking to track that data.
You don't need that. You can provide billing addresses of your customers without tracking web access.
IANAL, but.... you only need consent if it isn't required for your business to function. If you need to track to maintain your trademark, couldn't you argue any business with a trademark needs to track users?
I'm sure it wouldn't work in a real court, but it sounds funny in my head.
You still need a consent
If it is based on legitimate interest, under gdpr you don't.
You are required to inform the affected users, however.
Legitimate interest of the user, not yours. Rule of thumb, if its not a legal requirement, you need consent.
That’s not true. From the law as written:
> legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party…
There are six lawful bases for processing, consent is only one of them.
Most trademark holders have much more solid ways of demonstrating their mark's use in commerce, like financial and business records.
Right, but I think this case is interesting for the developer community as it targets specifically open-source use-cases, where you usually have neither extensive user per-country data, nor would you usually care about tracking, or have commercial offerings. This essentially means that you either cannot protect your open-source project name or have always to keep in mind to collect user per-country data, otherwise you risk getting deleted.
Is there no privacy-preserving per-country analytics library? No need to store IP Addresses!
I don't have advice on if you should pursue "the fight" or not.
What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things. I will probably get a lot of flack for it, but an example would be Google with the Go programming language. There was an existing language already developed and being used under that name. Google wanted to call it Go for "bigger" reasons and so they did.
Who is supposed to "fight" that?
In my opinion it's the maintainers of distros and maintainers of repositories. If they want to call their thing "foo" and there is already a "foo" in the repository, that sucks, kick rocks or call yours "foo-company-thing" since you're the one creating issues. You can likewise take the responsibility of explaining to your users why "foo-company-thing" is the name in all of the Internet as a whole. We didn't create those problems and I don't want to spend any of my time "solving" them for free.
> What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things
It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.
What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?
> It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.
It's advice I have followed myself and with expense.
> What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?
In this case I would be willing to help the NPM listings stay under his control and all of the other places he is already using the name "deepkit". I would help him expand that footprint if needed. I would help amplify his voice by publishing a blog entry. I don't have a large blog, but adding your voice has value. Right now this company sees this as X risk and Y cost and those numbers are low. If they have an invalid trademark ruling they may be able to force the issue eventually in some places, but don't make it easy for them.
If a prison analogy is needed, it's not what you see in the movies. Nobody shows up to prison and does the whole "fight the biggest guy" because they want to look tough etc. In the real world that gets you stabbed in your sleep. What happens instead is bullies who can and will win the fight in the long run are deterred by having to do the work and move to the weakest targets.
I don't know how much work the adversarial company has budgeted, what they think X or Y are, etc. What I think is important is to raise the cost, which is measured in many ways besides money.
Trademarks mean nothing. A bigger company can always come along and bully you till you give it up. Just like what happened to Allen Pan and his Mythbusters trademark.
What's especially egregious about this case to me is how the authorities didn't seem to even be able to articulate what would satisfy them, other than an overwhelming amount of documented EU commercial activity.
If you had 2 people documented as being in the EU who had purchased software licenses for 'Deepkit' for $10 is that enough? If not, why? Why is being big[1] justification for outright stealing a trademark from someone little? It's gross, is what it is. I'd rather eliminate the whole trademark construct than have it just automatically side with the largest party in any contested case.
[1] also, they may only be 'big' in terms of bank account balance, since they're some startup -- they may not have any EU customers yet themselves. Did they prove they did?
Sometimes, the little guy does win, but only after a lengthy court battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
My friend won a 9 figure trademark case with a mag7 company
Look, I hate to be that guy, but according to your own comment [1], it sounds like you started this fight when you tried to block them from registering the "Deepki" trademark in the EU.
They were perfectly happy to coexist with your project -- and nobody was going to confuse "Deepkit", a TypeScript framework, with "Deepki", a real estate sustainability platform.
But then you tried to stop them from registering their own name (which they had been using for years before you started your project). Why would you do this? They responded by filing to invalidate your trademark, which, given the circumstances, seems pretty reasonable. In the end, they won.
You say that you registered a trademark so that you could "live peacefully." Perhaps the lesson to learn is if you want to live peacefully, don't go around picking fights.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894521
To be honest, until reaching your comment this seemed like the small guy being bullied by the big bad corporation, but after looking at this, this does seem like the other company was quite polite or reasonable about this, while the small guy wanted really hard to get into a "fight".
What I take from this is, that if a .eu domain, or one of any TLD of an EU country has not page with real usage on it, that I then I can demand to have it cancelled and given the right to register it.
Should be the same, no? And if it's not, why didn't OP get the right to sell the trademark to that company?
Not sure if it's ok or not, what the TM office did there, because if not, then just registering TMs could also be done in the same way like domain squatting.
Maybe OP should find cases where such demands from powerful companies were rejected, even if they shouldn't have rejected them.
IANAL, but I remember a case with a startup where 2 of the founders were lawyers. They found themselves in a similar situation & decided not to fight it, but to use it as an opportunity to rebrand
On the other hand, a startup with $160M may be willing to pay u for a US trademark w/o going to court or arbitration
> On the other hand, a startup with $160M may be willing to pay u for a US trademark w/o going to court or arbitration
Not after this post, they're not. They've already got a US trademark, and if they simply Google it, and find this post, they're going to realize this person is never going to challenge them in a US court over it.
I've written Apache Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Free Software Foundation, and OpenSource Initiative, and asked for help. We will see. If OSS has no value to our law makers and the trademark needs to be deleted, that's fine and I accept the loss. But I'm an open-source contributor since over decade and not only love the spirit, but my whole career is based on it. The last thing I can do is to fight for justice, even if it means I need help from bigger firms/initiatives.
I can understand why you're frustrated if you feel like you've lost something, but trademarks serve a purpose for facilitating commercial trade. That isn't an attack on everything in the world that isn't non-commercial.
Nobody told you that you can't use the name, right? And you've still got a US mark, don't you? How is any of this harming your project or your career? ... or more importantly, how is this hurting consumers? Consumer protections are the entire legal reason for granting a trademark.
I mean, you can certainly fight their registration. I just don't know what you or your users would actually get out of it?
Trademarks serve the same purpose for free goods and services as they do for paid ones. It's just that giving things away for free is rare.
If setting your usage price to $0 means no trademark, that's a pretty big attack on non-commercial services. Alternatively if it's more about tracking, that's also quite bad in a different way.
Yes, but ultimately trademarks are a consumer protection, and what matters in granting a trademark is protecting consumers from harm.
I don't know much about this OSS project... but if there's a case that they need this trademark to protect consumers from harm, then that's your winning argument.
> If setting your usage price to $0 means no trademark, that's a pretty big attack on non-commercial services.
If you really are not doing commerce, trademarks are irrelevant. You can't get one, and you don't need one.
> Yes, but ultimately trademarks are a consumer protection, and what matters in granting a trademark is protecting consumers from harm.
Yes, protecting consumers. And people are equally consumers of something whether they pay $1 or $0.
> but if there's a case that they need this trademark to protect consumers from harm, then that's your winning argument.
Other than the normal argument for trademark and the evidence of use they had? If you have to show a specific argument for harm, that's way too high of a bar.
> If you really are not doing commerce, trademarks are irrelevant. You can't get one, and you don't need one.
Define "commerce" here.
If we count competing in the market but your product happens to be $0 as commerce, then sure I can agree but this project passes the test.
If a price of $0 disqualifies you from "commerce" then no way, trademarks are not irrelevant and you do still need one. Consumers need to be able to find your product and avoid imitators.
No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else. And if you're not, then you don't qualify for a trademark because trademarks are marks that you get to use when you do trade.
I am not asking for the evidence of what that commerce is. I personally do not care nor do I make the judgment of what qualifies.
But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.
And if you're not going to do any trade, then you don't need to worry about it. Because you cannot infringe on a trademark without doing trade.
> No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else.
Okay cool, glad we're on the same page there, but then I don't understand why you even made your initial comment saying "I can understand why you're frustrated if you feel like you've lost something, but trademarks serve a purpose for facilitating commercial trade."
By your definition, they are engaged in commercial trade. And that was well-documented in the initial post.
> But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.
And the issue is the trademark office is not taking their evidence. They're looking at hundreds of thousands of downloads and saying "hmmmm, might be 99% non-EU, we don't care"
> "hmmmm, might be 99% non-EU, we don't care"
That is what fascinates me the most. The basic assumptions of everything I presented was non-EU. Somewhat annoying, but seeing it objectively, I think it was a skill issue on my lawyers side. They should have said to me "Marc, look, we need hard proof. Ask your fucking users on twitter, on github, an discord, we need a list of X users confirming they are from the EU and use this thing". I believe in good-will on the EU side, that they interpret data in a positive way in my favor - but the exact opposite happened.
> And that was well-documented in the initial post.
I mean, there was some documentation. I don't know if it was well documented.
There's like 160 million reasons why the other company has better documentation.
Ultimately, the a point of holding a trademark is to give you some legal firepower. Going up against the company with $160 million, you're pretty much screwed anyway.
Their best bet in this scenario is to just use the name anyway and not piss them off. There are plenty of organizations, even very for-profit companies, that use the same name and don't have any problem with it because it's not confusing anybody or pissing anyone off.
> There's like 160 million reasons why the other company has better documentation.
Better documentation of someone else's user count?
Following this logic, does this mean if I have a project name like ABC, and some company decided to incorporate in this name plus registering the trademark, I have to give up the name when they decide to come after me? Like I have a github.com/ABC, a npmjs.com/org/ABC. All just gone, because trademarks right gives them the right, and I have nothing that protects me?
If that is the case, ok. It's just that I was naive enough to believe I could protect my little open-source project from this using a trademark. The EUPIO somewhat confirmed in their writing that you don't need commercial activities, but you need "genuine use", which is, again, hard to prove if you don't collect user data.
"ABC" is already a trademark. There's probably dozens if not hundreds of trademarks for "ABC".
Trademarks are only the right to use a name commercially for a particular good or service.
Anything outside of that is fair game.
If I consume a good or service then I’m a consumer, whether I had to pay for that good/service or not. As a consumer, it is in my interest that I can look up the name of the good or service and not have confusion as to which good/service I’m obtaining.
Yep. And if someone uses OPs mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services, then they have the right to sue them.
I don't think that's happened though.
But you don't get those protections or ability to sue if your trademark gets rejected, which is the problem here.
I don't know about the EU, but in the US a registered mark only gives you the presumption that's valid. But those presumptions can be challenged in court.
Of course, if you can't prove to the examiners that you even have a right to the mark, you're probably gonna have one snowball's chance in hell of a time proving that someone else's use of it is invalid in court.
Trademarks are for commerce, no? If you had charged even a few customers would it have helped?
Now that they own the trademark you can't make money off of it but you don't have to give anything up - if you have the url and aren't charging anyone you can hold onto it.
> I dealt with this years ago - it would have been about $250K to challenge the trademark for something that I'd been using for a few years.
You can't trademark something that is used already. That's why this is so egregious.
You're thinking about patents.
That's not true though.
So it appears.
https://deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle3
I think your mistake here was that you registered the TM but it was not linked to any business, therefore you lost it, which is expected outcome(irregardless of how you feel about it). If you would create a non-profit organisation that would own it, you'd be bulletproof.
> - Is it even worth getting a second opinion and appealing in the EU? I mean the project is very small.
If you can handle the costs or find pro-bono (EU) lawyers, then potentially yes.
Also take up a European petition to generate publicity for your case, maybe on the legal abuse of IP rights of open-source software companies.
Compare to e.g. 'Petition at the European Parliament "on the implementation of an EU-Linux operating system in public administrations across all EU countries"' (Petition No 0729/2024): https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1glo8tv/petitio...
(Sounds like the EU equivalent of cases that Larry Lessig and the EFF would take in the US; have you contacted them?)
Try to find open-source/startup-friendly MEPs, and for Bulgaria. And start blogging on LinkedIn. And mention your domain (deepkit.io) early and often. All publicity is good publicity. And present at the European open-source confs. Start making noise. Maybe you can't reverse your individual ruling (or maybe you can), but you can alert others.
> - They basically kept repeating that they couldn't clearly link any of the usage to the specific goods/services my trademark was registered for.
I don't get what they're claiming hits on your domain (deepkit.io) don't already show. Sounds bogus. They didn't cite any specific examples of what would have proven it?
>> the losing party in cancellation proceedings must bear fees and costs incurred by the other party.
What order of magnitude are those, if you are at liberty to say?
It sounds like another case of the favoritism given to commercial activity (and more favoritism the larger the scale of that activity). It's similar to how you can do various things and take various tax writeoffs if you do something as a business, but if you just do the same things without being a business, you're SOL.
Not worth it for 1800/views a year. Keep using the name though, since you held the trademark they can’t exactly argue that you can’t.
Is this the organization on GitHub?
https://github.com/voided-org
Did they recently rename to Voided Org?
Did you also lose the name in GitHub?
Currently:
https://github.com/deepkit => 404
https://github.com/deepkit/deepkit-framework => 301 redirect to https://github.com/marcj/untitled-code
https://deepkit.io/ => still up
No, I started to rename the repo and moved it to my personal account, out of frustration mainly. Not sure yet what the new name is going to be, or if I can keep the old one.
Well, logically you should be able to keep the old name because you have documented proof that your user base in EU is small enough that this should NOT cause any confusions between your name and the new trademark holder. Just keep the cancellation documents as proof that you use this name but not in EU. This is their claim and not yours, right? The other possibility is that if you have enough users in EU you should also keep the trademark. Only one of these can be true?
Also note that I already lost some court cases using my logic.
I think you should be as annoying as possible within the confines of the law. No reason to make it easy for them.
Condolences on this nonsense. Sounds like that company's actions are also causing anguish, and I hope a nice bulldog lawyer can help with that facet of the situation.
If you're interested in keeping it you need professional legal advice, not a bunch of anonymous people on the internet.
Sounds like the EUIPO isn't following its own rules. I wonder if there might be some corruption going on that might be addressed. It's certainly a ridiculous and dangerous ruling.
I get why they would care about usage, but this case does look like corruption.
You could have tried to offer to sell it to them? I dont think you can win it, no point burning a hole in your pocket
They could have offered a small fee to the original poster but no, they went straight to robbery.
What would you do if random corp would come and try to hijack your open source identity?
Did they actually try and hijack their identity? Hijack to me implies actively trying to steal their reputation. Sounds more like the name wasn't particularly unique and they independently decided they wanted to use that name.
it's more like this:
- They started as small firm in France, registered there the trademark Deepki, unrelated to software.
- I created Deepkit around 2018, trademarked in US and EU with software category.
- They raised substantial amount of money around 2022 $150M
- Board/Shareholders likely decided that the brand is important
- They tried to register the US brand under software category. The USPTO declined automatically because of "likelihood of confusion"
- They reached out to me wanting a "Consent and Coexistence Agreement", I told them not for free, to which they never responded with an offer.
- They tried to register in EU later, which I tried to block under the same "likelihood of confusion" ground.
- They started fighting with legal terms to get my brand deleted.
- They succeeded.
It's not necessarily only their fault that the trademark is gone now. As I just learned, the EU requires very strict rules of proving you have legit users. I couldn't convince them. Maybe due to skill issues, missing data, or technicalities. The biggest danger is now though that they can get me deleted from the internet entirely once the protection is gone. It requires just one corporation to decide to start come after you with a cancellation process, and you are done.
> They reached out to me wanting a "Consent and Coexistence Agreement", I told them not for free, to which they never responded with an offer.
Man, imagine if you had asked for a thousand euros as consideration.
So, you would spend several thousands of dollars to register a trademark to protect it from other corporations, and then the first thing you would do is give out the right to said corporation for 1000 bucks? I'm not an expert, but that sounds like a bad deal to me and substantially weakens the mark.
You are telling us straight into our faces that you only valued the trademark for its ability to earn money from lawsuits.
Not just that, you will also have to solve the mystery of how a one time payment is supposed to strengthen your trademark in the long run.
I'm clueless, how much did it cost to get the trademark registered?
> I'm not an expert, but that sounds like a bad deal to me and substantially weakens the mark.
Well, the alternative (in hindsight, admittedly) is losing it entirely?
> - They tried to register in EU later, which I tried to block under the same "likelihood of confusion" ground.
I might have misread - did they initially try and trademark "Deepki" or "Deepkit" when you attempted to block it?
Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable, and OP just experienced FAFO for trying to extort them.
> Right if a company wanted their trademark of “Deepki” to coexist with this trademark of “Deepkit” then that is perfectly reasonable
What kind of world do you live in?
It's no more reasonable for a product to trade under "Deepki" in the presence of the established mark "Deepkit" than it would be to name a school "Stamford University".
> presence of the established mark "Deepkit"
I think this is the key point, according to EU it is not
No, according to the EU there is no documentation that any of "hundreds of thousands" of users are located in the EU.
In neither case is it relevant to the idea that it is "reasonable" for Deepki to desire to use their mark in coexistence with the mark "Deepkit". Your argument is that they didn't want coexistence because the other mark didn't exist.
No, initially they tried to trademark "Deepki" in the US. It was not me blocking that, the USPTO itself decided to block the application on the grounds of "likelihood of confusion" to which Deepki could have appealed, but they did not. I assume it's so blatantly similar, that even the USPTO clerk decided to block it right from the start.
I understand for the US trademark, I'm asking about the EU trademark. If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.
I'm not claiming their response is any better, but I don't know anything about trademark issuance in the EU so I won't speak on that.
> If they weren't trying to trademark "Deepkit" why would you feel the need to attempt to block it? It feels unnecessarily hostile.
IANAL and dont really know, but my understanding is many places require you to defend it in order to keep it. If you become aware of something and fail to try and block it, that can be viewed as you've lost interest in the trademark and result in it being taken away from you.
> The biggest danger is now though that they can get me deleted from the internet entirely once the protection is gone.
You still have the US trademark, right? Unless the domain is .eu i dont see how that would happen.
They have all the money and there's nothing you can do about it. But that's what we love here on HN! VC and billionaires, corporations and executives!
As long as we get our highish salaries, our taxes don't rise and we can live in a nice neighbourhood away from the poor then we literally don't care about wealth accumulation, abuses of corporate power or lobbying.
Sure, pretend it's not true; but we've not done anything about it, we're not doing anything about it, and we're not going to do anything about it.
You can also write to FSFE about it, afaik they give legal advice in foss cases.
The best outcome, if they’re going to strong-arm it from you anyway, is to sell it to them.
Talk to a lawyer about optimal pricing, then offer to sell them the trademark for a decent discount versus what their strong-arm tactic will cost them (they have to pay lawyers too!)
The company wants your trademark for the lowest price. Just be cheaper than what they have to pay to legally steal it.
I guess you’ve fallen foul of the rules to protect against trademark “squatting”. They surely weren’t designed with (non-commercial) OSS projects in mind.
This is sad. Sorry to hear that!
Rename your project, and use your established SEO of the trademark to tell the your story. You aren't going to win, but at least make them lose a bit too.
This sucks. I hope you can find a positive in this and possibly find a better name for your popular project.
I haven't seen anything that mentions that trademarks are business classification specific. See Apple Corporation (the computer company) vs. Apple Corp (The Beatles holding company) for example.
Deepki is in a very different space to Deepkit (Although the former is a terrible brand name, and the latter sounds more related to deep learning).
Does an OSS project that doesn't trade have a classification? I have no idea.
fundamentally a trademark is to protect the mark of your trade
if you haven't traded (you say you haven't produced any revenue), there's no mark of trade to protect
I wonder if there’s a business opportunity here.
For a monthly fee, you can have “users as a service”. You will receive traffic from many, many users, who you can freely harvest all the data you want from and prove you have traffic. These users will not block analytics or any trackers, and are fully ready to be data mined.
Subscription tiers scale based on how many users you require.
The US one somehow feels even more insulting because at least the EU gave plausible excuses, the states didn't even bother!
Did you come first in time before the Deepki company? If so you probably have the ability to win. First in time wins, even if you were a small player. It would be their responsibility not to choose a project with a similar name to what you have if you came first.
This is yet another example of how utterly disingenuous the stated purpose of intellectual property laws are. There's all this talk from proponents about how it protects the little guys from abuse by big corporations, yet in reality it's the exact opposite every single time. Rights are taken away from the public with the force of the law while big businesses trample on the law to steal from individuals. For all the talk here about the best course of action being to "just" give in, things will keep getting progressively worse until there is collective action.
Honestly just cut your losses and move on
Google Analytics is not something that's "trademark used for actual trade"
Is the big company being a jerk? 100% But then sign m again the project is self-described as a "small OSS project"
I can understand it being handled like that as it prevents "trademark squatting"
I would be inclined to agree in the case of trademark squatting, but I fail to see how it can be squatting if the "squatter" owned the trademark since before the squatee existed. That just doesn't really make sense.
While I think there's very little chance for the author to overturn this decision, and thus agree with you that he should just move on, you should have a look at the amount of features this small project offers. I don't think this could be considered "trademark squatting", there's a real effort put in that project, and for many years.
Perhaps I have the wrong idea of what it means to do trademark squatting, or did I misunderstand your point?
What about their use of their trademark is 'trademark squatting', exactly?
It isn't and the person you replied to didn't claim it was. But there just simply is not much evidence that OP was using the term commercially.
They were not using it commercially (if I understood correctly) and that was not the point of dispute. The point of this post is that under EU regulations free software can be trademarked, but as there is no reason or payment info to track locations of its users, it could not prove that it was actually used within the EU. The evidence issue was about the location of the users and whether an FOSS project in the EU can realistically have a trademark based on the rules that supposedly allow it to have.
The problem is that this way it seems like an impossible battle. Even if you get location data of stuff like downloads (which is not sth you normally get if for example one clones the repo anyway), you cannot prove the software is actually used, unless you use analytics in the software itself. This sounds important for FOSS in the EU.
The choice of a software license really doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you engage in commerce.
I'll give you an example:
Linus Torvalds has a trademark on Linux. It's GPL, but there is plenty of evidence of commerce to support that trademark.
Here's the Linux Foundation's financial statement for instance:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_ar24_121524...
> In 2024 we are forecasting revenues of over $292M. In 2024, the Linux Foundation is forecasting to spend nearly $300M supporting our mission
That's some pretty solid evidence of commerce.
Ah, a real estate company with awful morals - color me shocked. I’d shop this around to a news agency for publicity.