Comment by kube-system
2 days ago
> 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.
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