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“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.” If he was releasing a
by stevenjohns 6y ago
“We must” is nonsense on the part of Kik. That’s part of the corporate b/s where people make it seem like things are “out of our hands.”
If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.
But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.
Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).
Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.
- gwillz 6y agoThis is it, really. Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole. So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it. No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.
- guug 6y ago> Trademarks require intent to mislead Is this a legal requirement?
- stevenjohns 6y agoI meant trademark violations. My bad. I edited the post and added the missing word.
- albedoa 6y agoAs someone else mentioned, your correction is also incorrect. One can violate trademark unintentionally.
- stevenjohns 6y agoNo, my correction is fine. It helps if you read the sentence in its entirety rather than stop reading at the comma... you know... where I specifically go on to say "or" followed with a whole bit on how it can be violated unintentionally and give an example of such. The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place. Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.
- albedoa 6y agoYour correction is not fine. English is my first language, and I am telling you that the way you wrote the sentence makes it incorrect. It's probably your grammar more than your misunderstanding of the facts. Another commenter said the same. The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky. > Maybe my English wasn't clear. What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Trademark violations require intent to mislead No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion. Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.
- stevenjohns 6y agoIf you see the second half of that sentence, with an example of how... > or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]
- albedoa 6y agoWe see the second half. Your sentence reduces to: > Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead. You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.
- stevenjohns 6y agoI’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve by leaving multiple successive comments threads about the same topic. I will reply to this message and will withdraw after this. —— The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.” If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.
- pdonis 6y ago> Neither of these things have occurred How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?