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> A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSea

> A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent. > you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission. I don’t know. The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. Maybe the exact wording matters and the service name was “AWS managed elastic search” or whatever. I’m sure the Amazon lawyers knew how to name it. This feels analogous to “Amazon Linux” where it’s clearly Amazon’s version of Linux (which is also a trademark). Or “hosted postgres” or “Postgres compatible RDS” or any number of other services based on OSS.

jacobr1 2y ago
> Maybe the exact wording matters and the service name was “AWS managed elastic search” or whatever. I’m sure the Amazon lawyers knew how to name it. Yep, that was the problem, they just called it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" and it resulted in a lawsuit.
jkaplowitz 2y ago
> The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. It isn’t, though, when comparing it to the ElasticSearch service offered by Elastic the company. Using the same codebase is very different than offering the same service. At minimum, pricing, billing, support, legalese, etc will all vary between the two. Downsides in Amazon’s service shouldn’t be misattributed to Elastic the company without Elastic’s permission, and trademark law quite rightly seems this more likely if Elastic trademarks are in the name of the product. As for RDS’s PostgreSQL version, I presume the lawyers very carefully made sure it was called Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (as indeed it is) and not PostgreSQL for Amazon RDS or PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS Edition or PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services. Wouldn’t any of these last three names quite reasonably make a lot of people blame the PostgreSQL project rather than Amazon for any failings? Doubly so if the PostgreSQL project offered their own managed service on AWS, as Elastic does. And as for Amazon Linux, I can think of a bunch of ways they might be operating legally in this regard, but a key one is that they probably have explicit permission from the Linux Foundation or Linux Torvalds to do as they do; in any case, the Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds are both highly unlikely to sue Amazon for this usage regardless of the legalities, for purely pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with whether a judge or jury would take the lawsuit seriously, and that don’t apply to companies like Elastic.
- maccard 2y ago
  Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks (which weren’t in place in this case)rather than focusing on the actual details of the product
  - jkaplowitz 2y ago
    > Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components that would nonconsensually report telemetry to Google from within the guest operating system beyond what is inherent to the nature of any VM running within Google's cloud, or default configurations that are unjustifiably different in ways that are undocumented and/or would surprise and disrupt the usual expectations of Debian users? Yes, trademark law is the reason Debian got to have those in-depth discussions and collaborations with Google. Source: I was quite personally involved, both as a Debian developer and as a then-Googler. (And Debian was more pragmatic than you might think about some of the specifics. I was surprised myself.) Trademark law is not bullshit even though the term "intellectual property" is. > No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. Not in the primary technical nature of the product or the underlying software, no, that's true. But in the overall aspect of whom to blame for the service's faults or credit with the service's strengths - in other words, who is viewed as endorsing the product with the corresponding responsibility for good or bad reputational and commercial consequences - then yes absolutely the naming does change that in a reasonable person's mind. Imagine you were not a cloud infrastructure expert but rather a stock market investor who sees a lengthy global outage occur in a managed PostgreSQL service running on Amazon Web Services. Further imagine that the PostgreSQL project were commercial enough of an organization to run their own managed PostgreSQL service on AWS in competition to the one run by Amazon, and had PostgreSQL stock traded on a public stock exchange, similar to Elastic's real situation. In this hypothetical scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the PostgreSQL for Amazon Database" would look bad for the PostgreSQL project and would make the investor likely to sell or short PostgreSQL stock and/or (since the two services compete) buy Amazon stock? And in the same scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the Amazon Database for PostgreSQL" would entirely swap the reputational and financial/commercial impact on both organizations? (I'm saying "Amazon Database" instead of "RDS" to sidestep the inside-baseball question of whether someone happens to know that Amazon doesn't let external vendors make flavors of the suite of services called RDS. That's an implementation detail that could easily be false at some future time and upon which trademark law cannot usefully rely.) > (which weren’t in place in this case) Huh? Elastic definitely had a trademark in place. Not sure why you think they didn't. > It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks [...] rather than focusing on the actual details of the product Why do you assume that? My assumption is that both Elastic and Amazon spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when naming their products.

jacobr1 2y ago

> Maybe the exact wording matters and the service name was “AWS managed elastic search” or whatever. I’m sure the Amazon lawyers knew how to name it. Yep, that was the problem, they just called it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" and it resulted in a lawsuit.

jkaplowitz 2y ago

> The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. It isn’t, though, when comparing it to the ElasticSearch service offered by Elastic the company. Using the same codebase is very different than offering the same service. At minimum, pricing, billing, support, legalese, etc will all vary between the two. Downsides in Amazon’s service shouldn’t be misattributed to Elastic the company without Elastic’s permission, and trademark law quite rightly seems this more likely if Elastic trademarks are in the name of the product. As for RDS’s PostgreSQL version, I presume the lawyers very carefully made sure it was called Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (as indeed it is) and not PostgreSQL for Amazon RDS or PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS Edition or PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services. Wouldn’t any of these last three names quite reasonably make a lot of people blame the PostgreSQL project rather than Amazon for any failings? Doubly so if the PostgreSQL project offered their own managed service on AWS, as Elastic does. And as for Amazon Linux, I can think of a bunch of ways they might be operating legally in this regard, but a key one is that they probably have explicit permission from the Linux Foundation or Linux Torvalds to do as they do; in any case, the Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds are both highly unlikely to sue Amazon for this usage regardless of the legalities, for purely pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with whether a judge or jury would take the lawsuit seriously, and that don’t apply to companies like Elastic.

maccard 2y ago
Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks (which weren’t in place in this case)rather than focusing on the actual details of the product
- jkaplowitz 2y ago
  > Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit. Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components that would nonconsensually report telemetry to Google from within the guest operating system beyond what is inherent to the nature of any VM running within Google's cloud, or default configurations that are unjustifiably different in ways that are undocumented and/or would surprise and disrupt the usual expectations of Debian users? Yes, trademark law is the reason Debian got to have those in-depth discussions and collaborations with Google. Source: I was quite personally involved, both as a Debian developer and as a then-Googler. (And Debian was more pragmatic than you might think about some of the specifics. I was surprised myself.) Trademark law is not bullshit even though the term "intellectual property" is. > No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”. Not in the primary technical nature of the product or the underlying software, no, that's true. But in the overall aspect of whom to blame for the service's faults or credit with the service's strengths - in other words, who is viewed as endorsing the product with the corresponding responsibility for good or bad reputational and commercial consequences - then yes absolutely the naming does change that in a reasonable person's mind. Imagine you were not a cloud infrastructure expert but rather a stock market investor who sees a lengthy global outage occur in a managed PostgreSQL service running on Amazon Web Services. Further imagine that the PostgreSQL project were commercial enough of an organization to run their own managed PostgreSQL service on AWS in competition to the one run by Amazon, and had PostgreSQL stock traded on a public stock exchange, similar to Elastic's real situation. In this hypothetical scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the PostgreSQL for Amazon Database" would look bad for the PostgreSQL project and would make the investor likely to sell or short PostgreSQL stock and/or (since the two services compete) buy Amazon stock? And in the same scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the Amazon Database for PostgreSQL" would entirely swap the reputational and financial/commercial impact on both organizations? (I'm saying "Amazon Database" instead of "RDS" to sidestep the inside-baseball question of whether someone happens to know that Amazon doesn't let external vendors make flavors of the suite of services called RDS. That's an implementation detail that could easily be false at some future time and upon which trademark law cannot usefully rely.) > (which weren’t in place in this case) Huh? Elastic definitely had a trademark in place. Not sure why you think they didn't. > It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks [...] rather than focusing on the actual details of the product Why do you assume that? My assumption is that both Elastic and Amazon spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when naming their products.