4 ms·

Take the past of least resistance. It doesn't sound like you have a dog in the fight, so you should change it. IANAL - Can he sue you? Anyone can sue anybody

Take the past of least resistance. It doesn't sound like you have a dog in the fight, so you should change it. IANAL - Can he sue you? Anyone can sue anybody, for anything. Whether his claim is legit, or whether or not he would win, there's only one way to find out. Scary lawyer letter is the first step any attorney would take. It's a shot across the bow. But, at this point, you don't know if that's all they got or not. The only thing worse than the feeling you get when you get a nasty-gram from a lawyer, is the feeling you get when you are named in an lawsuit. You could do some game theory to figure out how much he might be willing to pay you to change the name, but that assumes he's a rational actor. Which could be a big assumption.

dmacedo 15y ago
The OP's tone, seems more of a search for clarification on the legal basis, rather than genuine interest in defending the repo. The legal base (non-existing trademark, so therefore unclear - only based on previous usage) seems foggy and would have to be decided in court. So either you get into an out-of-court agreement, or go to civil court and stand your case. If there's any interest in keeping the name, you should probably just contact a lawyer and clarify with him. But if you don't care, to the point where you can just rename the repo and let the other guy have it (which I'm assuming is the whole point of the letter...) My move would be to keep save your project to a new repo, and just leave and empty readme to keep the name in-use. Even if you don't reply a number of times, that lawyering up (at least to me) looks like a dick scare tactics move...