3 ms·

the group involved here may want to be mindful of the Mastodon gGmbH trademarks. Using the Mastodon logo on redplanetlabs.com to pitch a reimplementation of Act

by riffic 3y ago

the group involved here may want to be mindful of the Mastodon gGmbH trademarks. Using the Mastodon logo on redplanetlabs.com to pitch a reimplementation of ActivityPub might be seen as infringing. https://joinmastodon.org/trademark https://joinmastodon.org/trademark removed part about the mastodon subreddit since this is clearly not about the Mastodon software per se.

hedora 3y ago
Any trademark case is going to have to prove that a reasonable person would think this article is from Mastodon gGmbH, or is talking about their product "Mastodon". The top of the page reads "Red Planet Labs", the title of the article is "How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x" and the first line of the article is "We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code." No reasonable person is going to think that this article has anything to do with the official Mastodon software, so there's no trademark issue here.
- riffic 3y ago
  there's this though: https://mastodon.redplanetlabs.com/timeline/local https://mastodon.redplanetlabs.com/timeline/local and this from the gGmbH trademark policy: > You may not use the Mastodon word mark, or any similar mark, in your domain name, unless you have written permission from Mastodon gGmbH.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Trademark law doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to license your trademark in the same way you get to license copyrighted works. Otherwise, people could just say you can’t use their trademark in any document that says something negative about them, and then successfully sue the press and angry customers for complaining about them.
    - riffic 3y ago
      The WordPress Foundation has the same restrictions concerning use of their trademark as part of a domain name: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

by riffic 3y ago

hedora 3y ago

Any trademark case is going to have to prove that a reasonable person would think this article is from Mastodon gGmbH, or is talking about their product "Mastodon". The top of the page reads "Red Planet Labs", the title of the article is "How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x" and the first line of the article is "We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code." No reasonable person is going to think that this article has anything to do with the official Mastodon software, so there's no trademark issue here.

riffic 3y ago
there's this though: https://mastodon.redplanetlabs.com/timeline/local https://mastodon.redplanetlabs.com/timeline/local and this from the gGmbH trademark policy: > You may not use the Mastodon word mark, or any similar mark, in your domain name, unless you have written permission from Mastodon gGmbH.
- hedora 3y ago
  Trademark law doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to license your trademark in the same way you get to license copyrighted works. Otherwise, people could just say you can’t use their trademark in any document that says something negative about them, and then successfully sue the press and angry customers for complaining about them.
  - riffic 3y ago
    The WordPress Foundation has the same restrictions concerning use of their trademark as part of a domain name: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/