Comment by raverbashing
2 days ago
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.
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