4 ms·

Flip side: If someone takes out a patent and has a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent business around actually performing the patent, but sues anyone who

Flip side: If someone takes out a patent and has a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent business around actually performing the patent, but sues anyone who independently comes up with the same idea, we call that person a "troll". If someone chooses a name for a project and builds a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent community around it, but complains about anyone who independently tries to use the same name, we curse his vile oppressors. (Is there just a bit of a difference between this situation and a patent troll? Yes. Is the difference small enough that you can see there from here? Yes. Should people be thinking pretty hard about what precedents they want in this type of situation? You bet your ass they should.)

invisible 16y ago
You liken it to a patent but it is more similar to a trademark. I would think most everyone agrees trademarks are very good things in practice 99.9% of the time.
- chc 16y ago
  That's because if you don't use your trademark, you lose it. There's no equivalent to "Oh, I used the name in a little-known paper I wrote and now I can sue you." If nobody knows about your trademark, you probably don't own it.
  - protomyth 16y ago
    Technically it isn't the lack of use that will kill a trademark, it is the lack of defense or people using it as a generic term. The need to defend actually causes most of the trouble with trademarks since you really need to be a little more agressive than you would like.
protomyth 16y ago
The term "patent troll" is most commonly used when someone doesn't have a product and sues others for infringement on the patent. If someone was producing a product based on the patent they are using it and not really trolling, just following the intended function of the patent. I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful. I get the feeling that he just wished Google had done a search and left him alone.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful. The thing with project names is that they're used by definition. To draw a better analogy from trademark law, the standard is not "is the name in use", but whether use of the name for something new would cause confusion. In this case, the overwhelming majority of material on the original "Go" consists of articles complaining about the name conflict. The actual community around it seems to consist of the guy who came up with it, and so few other people as to be effectively nonexistent. Thus, what is the likelihood of actual confusion occurring? Which gets me back to the question I wanted people to think about: what level of use of a project name should qualify for "nobody else gets to use this"? If anything anyone's ever used -- regardless of how much notoriety or traction they gained in doing so -- is off-limits, we're going to have to resort to random strings of characters pretty soon, and start moving our way up through the Unicode planes as we do so :)

invisible 16y ago

You liken it to a patent but it is more similar to a trademark. I would think most everyone agrees trademarks are very good things in practice 99.9% of the time.

chc 16y ago
That's because if you don't use your trademark, you lose it. There's no equivalent to "Oh, I used the name in a little-known paper I wrote and now I can sue you." If nobody knows about your trademark, you probably don't own it.
- protomyth 16y ago
  Technically it isn't the lack of use that will kill a trademark, it is the lack of defense or people using it as a generic term. The need to defend actually causes most of the trouble with trademarks since you really need to be a little more agressive than you would like.

protomyth 16y ago

The term "patent troll" is most commonly used when someone doesn't have a product and sues others for infringement on the patent. If someone was producing a product based on the patent they are using it and not really trolling, just following the intended function of the patent. I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful. I get the feeling that he just wished Google had done a search and left him alone.

ubernostrum 16y ago
I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful. The thing with project names is that they're used by definition. To draw a better analogy from trademark law, the standard is not "is the name in use", but whether use of the name for something new would cause confusion. In this case, the overwhelming majority of material on the original "Go" consists of articles complaining about the name conflict. The actual community around it seems to consist of the guy who came up with it, and so few other people as to be effectively nonexistent. Thus, what is the likelihood of actual confusion occurring? Which gets me back to the question I wanted people to think about: what level of use of a project name should qualify for "nobody else gets to use this"? If anything anyone's ever used -- regardless of how much notoriety or traction they gained in doing so -- is off-limits, we're going to have to resort to random strings of characters pretty soon, and start moving our way up through the Unicode planes as we do so :)