10 ms·

"Hackathon" Has Been Trademarked in Germany

102 points by 67726e 14y ago

C1D 14y ago
This has been trademarked in Germany so it shouldn't be a problem for people in other places, I presume (correct me if I'm wrong); but, this will be a problem for Germans. A quick google search shows that there are Hackathons happening in Germany and I'd like to know if the holder will take legal action.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Why? The trademark has been filed in Germany by a German events directory. Their main focus appears to be club events, not nerd events and indeed there is only one listing from mid last year for a hackathon. Are they getting into the trademark troll business on the side?
- atuttle 14y ago
  Nachtleben.de seems to have also some kind of IT recruitement branch: http://www.young-targets.com/imprint/ http://www.young-targets.com/imprint/
- martin_k 14y ago
  It's the same agency that does http://www.nerd-zone.com/ http://www.nerd-zone.com/, which seems to be partially funded by public money. Edit: The agency also has a word mark on "Nerd Zone", both seem to be motivated by this: http://www.nerd-zone.com/hackathon http://www.nerd-zone.com/hackathon.
- NicoleSimon 14y ago
  That is the entity filing, probably easier. Here is the claimed background for this http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ with implying that most of the people are on board with this - most of the organizer used in that image however where only asked if they liked the idea of the techhub nothing more. The good thing about the connected world is that those kinds of statements can be easily verified. The discussion is happening with the guy here https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/440965452654247/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/44... if you don't like to join, you can see statements of organizers also here https://www.facebook.com/nicole.simon/posts/10151640773611303 https://www.facebook.com/nicole.simon/posts/1015164077361130...
jschuur 14y ago
... in Germany.
hdragomir 14y ago
Hackathons are actually pretty popular here, especially in Berlin. I'll keep you updated if I hear of anybody running into trouble because of this.
jcampbell1 14y ago
Germans apparently allow all sorts of English words to be trademarked. I ran into the problem buying Google ads, and the ads would get rejected for a trademark violation. The whole campaign would get messed up because I targeted english speakers worldwide and the ads got rejected because the word "immersion" is trademarked in Germany. Edit: I think Google has since improved the error message and gives a message like "Ad is running, but cannot be run in all regions due to a trademark issue." Adwords used to just reject the ad with ominous text "trademark violation".
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  "Germans apparently allow all sorts of English words to be trademarked." Like "Apple"?
  - protomyth 14y ago
    In the US, you couldn't trademark the word "Apple" in the food category since it is the term for a group of fruits. It is valid in other categories.
    - scoot 14y ago
      Which means it should at most be blocked for categories in which a trademark is held, not for ads in other categories, or use as a generic word - if at all.
      - protomyth 14y ago
        Not sure about German law or how much research they do into words before they allow the trademark. It does seem a bit of due diligence was missed.
  - jcampbell1 14y ago
    You are right, that may not be a fair characterization. The problem I see is how a list of trademarked words becomes blacklisted for use in advertising. I am fine if Germans want to let any word be trademarked, and then sort it out later in the court system. But we have a situation where the trademark list is auto-uploaded to Google and stops the word "hackathon" from being used in ads in Germany, thus a real problem.
brandon_wirtz 14y ago
You can trademark anything that isn't already trademarked, but you have to defend the trademark if you want to enforce the trademark. Trademarks are a lot like patents, the due diligence when filing is on the filer for the most part. The agency only checks against the filings. So you can get a trademark for Hackathon, but if you tried to enforce it you would lose if there are prior uses by others. You could get a Trademark in an alternate context. Like if you decided to combine a marathon with a machete and have a run through the jungle. That could be a new use for Hackathon that would be unlikely to cause confusion in the market. That said I'm sure they will send some C&D's and scare some people in to not using the term. The "Hon" trademark for a Baltimore restaurant springs to mind. Where the owner tried to extract money from the city of Baltimore, but she ended up dropping the trademark after community backlash.
- Sakes 14y ago
  Ya, the "Hon" trademark was ridiculous. I think I saw that on kitchen nightmares. I could see a similar backlash happening over hackathon. If that happened in the states I'd definitely boycott someone trying to own something that belongs to the community.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  >You can trademark anything that isn't already trademarked // That's absolutely wrong in the UK and USA. In Germany their English language guidance notes say: "The following are also excluded from registration: promotional statements, general advertising slogans and word sequences that have become customary in the current language as fixed expression." So it's wrong there too. >"the due diligence when filing is on the filer for the most part" In some jurisdictions but by no means all. I'm surprised there were no oppositions filed, guess TM registrations are off most peoples radars. Of course the TM lacks distinctiveness and so is probably going to be struck down, doesn't stop them wielding it as part of a shakedown though.
Roritharr 14y ago
I've organized a few hackathons in Germany and am pretty disgusted by finding this. I've already contacted a few fellow organizers to find out what we can do about this.
- addandsubtract 14y ago
  Call it Distrupathon
- unreal37 14y ago
  Doesn't a trademark have the same rules of a patent, i.e. "prior art"? Don't do anything. Let the company try and stop you.
  - Roritharr 14y ago
    In Germany they could stop me with a cease and desist i'd be court ordered to stop organizing an event until i can prove his claim wrong. But as i've mentioned in my other post, this won't happen, it seems the good guys trademarked it.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- Roritharr 14y ago
  I've just heard through the grapevine that this was created as a protective trademark, to prevent the exact thing we're afraid was going to happen. An official statement from the CEO of the company will follow soon.
  - NicoleSimon 14y ago
    And the earth is flat.
eno2001 14y ago
Germans brothers called 'Samwer' copycat any existing successful website like ebay, amazon etc. Now they probably will trademark any single existing word. So typically german, just like chinese...
- voidiac 14y ago
  I can't see any connection to the Samwers or any of their companies in this case.
- _ak 14y ago
  The German tech- and startup-scene hates the Samwer brothers as much as the rest of the world because they gave German startups a bad name.
wambotron 14y ago
All part of my plan to make "Hackgasm" the next big thing.
kirualex 14y ago
Getting really sick of this corporate bulsh*t
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mattfieldy 14y ago
I'm sorry, but are you fucking kidding me?
troymc 14y ago
I went to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) site and searched for the word "hackathon" in their (US) trademark database and it didn't find anything, so US-based hackathons should be fine (for now). In Germany, I'm sure the Germans can come up with some long-German-word-like-'marathon-of-hacking'-that-means-the-same-thing-as-hackathon, if they haven't already.
- rubinelli 14y ago
  Hopefully, they will get the trademark preemptively this time. I vote for "Codefest".
  - moontear 14y ago
    Codefest it is. Like the sound of it.
Udo 14y ago
It's a shame this hasn't been posted anywhere before the deadline for Opposition Proceedings had been reached (March 7th 2013). Whether it would have been possible to stop this at all is another matter, of course.
- dj-wonk 14y ago
  What about this...? A simple tool might be useful as a first line of defense against silly filings. First, the tool could monitor trademark filings. Second, it could compare against common words, perhaps from a dictionary. Third, it could score filings using a 'frivolity' score. Fourth, perhaps it could expose its a moderation queue via a mailing list or web interface. Fifth, maybe it could be gamified?
  - unreal37 14y ago
    Hackathon doesn't appear in any dictionary. Maybe you should use Google Search result count. If a phrase doesn't appear frequently online, its ok to trademark. If there are 10 million results, it should be flagged.
    - dj-wonk 14y ago
      Wiktionary has a very inclusive list of definitions. It does include hackathon: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hackathon http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hackathon For such a tool to be most useful, I'd recommend gathering data from several places (such as DuckDuckGo, Wiktionary, Wikipedia). Also, it would be better not to be tied to fixed thresholds (such as 10 million results); rather, it would likely be better to construct a feature vector and try out various machine learning approaches.
mkoble11 14y ago
This just shows that "hackathon" is becoming more popularized. Today, everything is a "hackathon" which is rather annoying, IMO. In the past year or so, we've seen legal hackathons [1], marketing hackathons [2] and more. Now, more and more corporations are starting to get into the hackathon game - eg. Campbell's disaster a few months back [3]. With popularity comes consequence, but perhaps the "spirit" of a hackathon is what matters: getting people to GTFO of their element, come together and create something in a short period of time. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/legal-hackathon-lawyers-hackers-brooklyn-law-school_n_1431038.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/legal-hackathon-law... [2] http://atdc.org/2012/07/atlanta-hosts-worlds-first-marketing-hackathon.html http://atdc.org/2012/07/atlanta-hosts-worlds-first-marketing... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086013
wazoox 14y ago
In the late 90's some guy trademarked "Halloween" in France, because "Halloween" wasn't in any French dictionary back then. He made an incredible fortune by going after all of those (starting with McDonald's and Disney) making Halloween-based advertising.
thomasbachem 14y ago
Their official blog post and explanation: http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ There's a pretty big discussion/shitstorm going on in the Berlin Startups Facebook group. The trademark owners claim that they want to use the licensing fees to support non-commercial events, quotation: "I think it's worth trying. If not, there sure will be other ways to finance non-commercial projects. I any cases it's better that it's a trademark of a non-commercial project, than of some cease-and-desist law firm." I totally disagree with that whole idea though. Makes us Germans look ridiculous :-).
- thomasbachem 14y ago
  They removed the image. Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/279887/pm/03-05-2013%2019-42-07.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/279887/pm/03-05-2013%201...
- NicoleSimon 14y ago
  The discussion can be found here https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/440965452654247/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/44... with the guy in charge. (You need to join the group to see the discussion)

102 points by 67726e 14y ago

C1D 14y ago

This has been trademarked in Germany so it shouldn't be a problem for people in other places, I presume (correct me if I'm wrong); but, this will be a problem for Germans. A quick google search shows that there are Hackathons happening in Germany and I'd like to know if the holder will take legal action.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

Why? The trademark has been filed in Germany by a German events directory. Their main focus appears to be club events, not nerd events and indeed there is only one listing from mid last year for a hackathon. Are they getting into the trademark troll business on the side?

atuttle 14y ago
Nachtleben.de seems to have also some kind of IT recruitement branch: http://www.young-targets.com/imprint/ http://www.young-targets.com/imprint/
martin_k 14y ago
It's the same agency that does http://www.nerd-zone.com/ http://www.nerd-zone.com/, which seems to be partially funded by public money. Edit: The agency also has a word mark on "Nerd Zone", both seem to be motivated by this: http://www.nerd-zone.com/hackathon http://www.nerd-zone.com/hackathon.
NicoleSimon 14y ago
That is the entity filing, probably easier. Here is the claimed background for this http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ with implying that most of the people are on board with this - most of the organizer used in that image however where only asked if they liked the idea of the techhub nothing more. The good thing about the connected world is that those kinds of statements can be easily verified. The discussion is happening with the guy here https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/440965452654247/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/44... if you don't like to join, you can see statements of organizers also here https://www.facebook.com/nicole.simon/posts/10151640773611303 https://www.facebook.com/nicole.simon/posts/1015164077361130...

jschuur 14y ago

... in Germany.

hdragomir 14y ago

Hackathons are actually pretty popular here, especially in Berlin. I'll keep you updated if I hear of anybody running into trouble because of this.

jcampbell1 14y ago

Germans apparently allow all sorts of English words to be trademarked. I ran into the problem buying Google ads, and the ads would get rejected for a trademark violation. The whole campaign would get messed up because I targeted english speakers worldwide and the ads got rejected because the word "immersion" is trademarked in Germany. Edit: I think Google has since improved the error message and gives a message like "Ad is running, but cannot be run in all regions due to a trademark issue." Adwords used to just reject the ad with ominous text "trademark violation".

tlrobinson 14y ago
"Germans apparently allow all sorts of English words to be trademarked." Like "Apple"?
- protomyth 14y ago
  In the US, you couldn't trademark the word "Apple" in the food category since it is the term for a group of fruits. It is valid in other categories.
  - scoot 14y ago
    Which means it should at most be blocked for categories in which a trademark is held, not for ads in other categories, or use as a generic word - if at all.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      Not sure about German law or how much research they do into words before they allow the trademark. It does seem a bit of due diligence was missed.
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  You are right, that may not be a fair characterization. The problem I see is how a list of trademarked words becomes blacklisted for use in advertising. I am fine if Germans want to let any word be trademarked, and then sort it out later in the court system. But we have a situation where the trademark list is auto-uploaded to Google and stops the word "hackathon" from being used in ads in Germany, thus a real problem.

brandon_wirtz 14y ago

You can trademark anything that isn't already trademarked, but you have to defend the trademark if you want to enforce the trademark. Trademarks are a lot like patents, the due diligence when filing is on the filer for the most part. The agency only checks against the filings. So you can get a trademark for Hackathon, but if you tried to enforce it you would lose if there are prior uses by others. You could get a Trademark in an alternate context. Like if you decided to combine a marathon with a machete and have a run through the jungle. That could be a new use for Hackathon that would be unlikely to cause confusion in the market. That said I'm sure they will send some C&D's and scare some people in to not using the term. The "Hon" trademark for a Baltimore restaurant springs to mind. Where the owner tried to extract money from the city of Baltimore, but she ended up dropping the trademark after community backlash.

Sakes 14y ago
Ya, the "Hon" trademark was ridiculous. I think I saw that on kitchen nightmares. I could see a similar backlash happening over hackathon. If that happened in the states I'd definitely boycott someone trying to own something that belongs to the community.
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
>You can trademark anything that isn't already trademarked // That's absolutely wrong in the UK and USA. In Germany their English language guidance notes say: "The following are also excluded from registration: promotional statements, general advertising slogans and word sequences that have become customary in the current language as fixed expression." So it's wrong there too. >"the due diligence when filing is on the filer for the most part" In some jurisdictions but by no means all. I'm surprised there were no oppositions filed, guess TM registrations are off most peoples radars. Of course the TM lacks distinctiveness and so is probably going to be struck down, doesn't stop them wielding it as part of a shakedown though.

Roritharr 14y ago

I've organized a few hackathons in Germany and am pretty disgusted by finding this. I've already contacted a few fellow organizers to find out what we can do about this.

addandsubtract 14y ago
Call it Distrupathon
unreal37 14y ago
Doesn't a trademark have the same rules of a patent, i.e. "prior art"? Don't do anything. Let the company try and stop you.
- Roritharr 14y ago
  In Germany they could stop me with a cease and desist i'd be court ordered to stop organizing an event until i can prove his claim wrong. But as i've mentioned in my other post, this won't happen, it seems the good guys trademarked it.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
Roritharr 14y ago
I've just heard through the grapevine that this was created as a protective trademark, to prevent the exact thing we're afraid was going to happen. An official statement from the CEO of the company will follow soon.
- NicoleSimon 14y ago
  And the earth is flat.

eno2001 14y ago

Germans brothers called 'Samwer' copycat any existing successful website like ebay, amazon etc. Now they probably will trademark any single existing word. So typically german, just like chinese...

voidiac 14y ago
I can't see any connection to the Samwers or any of their companies in this case.
_ak 14y ago
The German tech- and startup-scene hates the Samwer brothers as much as the rest of the world because they gave German startups a bad name.

wambotron 14y ago

All part of my plan to make "Hackgasm" the next big thing.

kirualex 14y ago

Getting really sick of this corporate bulsh*t

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mattfieldy 14y ago

I'm sorry, but are you fucking kidding me?

troymc 14y ago

I went to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) site and searched for the word "hackathon" in their (US) trademark database and it didn't find anything, so US-based hackathons should be fine (for now). In Germany, I'm sure the Germans can come up with some long-German-word-like-'marathon-of-hacking'-that-means-the-same-thing-as-hackathon, if they haven't already.

rubinelli 14y ago
Hopefully, they will get the trademark preemptively this time. I vote for "Codefest".
- moontear 14y ago
  Codefest it is. Like the sound of it.

Udo 14y ago

It's a shame this hasn't been posted anywhere before the deadline for Opposition Proceedings had been reached (March 7th 2013). Whether it would have been possible to stop this at all is another matter, of course.

dj-wonk 14y ago
What about this...? A simple tool might be useful as a first line of defense against silly filings. First, the tool could monitor trademark filings. Second, it could compare against common words, perhaps from a dictionary. Third, it could score filings using a 'frivolity' score. Fourth, perhaps it could expose its a moderation queue via a mailing list or web interface. Fifth, maybe it could be gamified?
- unreal37 14y ago
  Hackathon doesn't appear in any dictionary. Maybe you should use Google Search result count. If a phrase doesn't appear frequently online, its ok to trademark. If there are 10 million results, it should be flagged.
  - dj-wonk 14y ago
    Wiktionary has a very inclusive list of definitions. It does include hackathon: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hackathon http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hackathon For such a tool to be most useful, I'd recommend gathering data from several places (such as DuckDuckGo, Wiktionary, Wikipedia). Also, it would be better not to be tied to fixed thresholds (such as 10 million results); rather, it would likely be better to construct a feature vector and try out various machine learning approaches.

mkoble11 14y ago

This just shows that "hackathon" is becoming more popularized. Today, everything is a "hackathon" which is rather annoying, IMO. In the past year or so, we've seen legal hackathons [1], marketing hackathons [2] and more. Now, more and more corporations are starting to get into the hackathon game - eg. Campbell's disaster a few months back [3]. With popularity comes consequence, but perhaps the "spirit" of a hackathon is what matters: getting people to GTFO of their element, come together and create something in a short period of time. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/legal-hackathon-lawyers-hackers-brooklyn-law-school_n_1431038.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/legal-hackathon-law... [2] http://atdc.org/2012/07/atlanta-hosts-worlds-first-marketing-hackathon.html http://atdc.org/2012/07/atlanta-hosts-worlds-first-marketing... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086013

wazoox 14y ago

In the late 90's some guy trademarked "Halloween" in France, because "Halloween" wasn't in any French dictionary back then. He made an incredible fortune by going after all of those (starting with McDonald's and Disney) making Halloween-based advertising.

thomasbachem 14y ago

Their official blog post and explanation: http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ http://www.young-targets.com/formation-of-tech_hub-started/ There's a pretty big discussion/shitstorm going on in the Berlin Startups Facebook group. The trademark owners claim that they want to use the licensing fees to support non-commercial events, quotation: "I think it's worth trying. If not, there sure will be other ways to finance non-commercial projects. I any cases it's better that it's a trademark of a non-commercial project, than of some cease-and-desist law firm." I totally disagree with that whole idea though. Makes us Germans look ridiculous :-).

thomasbachem 14y ago
They removed the image. Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/279887/pm/03-05-2013%2019-42-07.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/279887/pm/03-05-2013%201...
NicoleSimon 14y ago
The discussion can be found here https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/440965452654247/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/permalink/44... with the guy in charge. (You need to join the group to see the discussion)