Oddbean new post about login | logout I'm not sure what your point is here. Like I said, trademark law is a enforce it or lose it thing: you have to stop people from infringing on your trademark or you can lose it. However in this case, we clearly have a situation where a trademark was issued for a generic term: Coinkite is threatening someone for using a name, btcclock, that Ricardo Cassata came up with _7_ years ago for the same concept, long before the Blockclock even existed. Coinkite chose to try to enforce their trademark broadly when they, at minimum, could have accepted that their trademark should apply narrowly given the fact that it is pretty generic. If the defendant was calling their project a "Blockclock" this situation would be more reasonable. They're not. They're using a different name.
I'm referring to "a trademark should have never been issued". I do think they made right decision to apply for one. Whether they should enforce it against others I don't know.
Nothing forces you to apply for a trademark. You can just accept that people may use the term "blockclock" to talk about block clocks. Coinkite is also a trademarked term, and it's a distinctive one that I have no issue with. They can just call their product a Coinkite Blockclock and everything would be fine. Anyway, this is irrelevant here: the competition they're threatening used the term BTClock. Which ironically is arguably _more_ distinctive than Blockclock due to the distinct spelling.
Incidentally, if you actually search the Canadian trademark databases you'll see there's four Blockclock trademarks filed, for both the name and the logo; the logo is distinctly different from the BTClock. Though it's still very generic. Just seven white boxes on a black background. Reminds me of how Apple tried to get a design patent on the black rectangle phone design...
> You can just accept that people may use the term "blockclock" to talk about block clocks. That doesn't work if an adversarial company files the trademark instead. An evil version of Djuri could have taken down Coinkite's Github and hosting that way. If he had trademarked BTCClock and there no Blockclock trademark already. The only defense against such an attack is already having a trademark, because that is the only way you're going to quickly and successfully appeal a takedown.
That's not how trademarks work. Previously having used a conflicting trademark is a defense. There's a long list of examples of big companies trying to use their trademarks against pre-existing users and failing.
I think you're talking about how they work in the court system. Unfortunately much of the world is run by the kangaroo courts of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon which have very different rules. E.g. on the topic copyright, having obviously written a book yourself is not enough evidence to get it listed. Once their black box system flags something, you're fucked unless you take them to court or unless you can give them the piece of paper they want. https://sprovoost.nl/2022/06/01/amazon-and-the-dystopian-future-of-book-censorship/
I think you are confusing trademark with patent. Trademarks are names or stylistic art providing distinctiveness to a business, such as a logo with or without the trade name. The shape or orientation of components of the block-clock don't qualify as a trademark whatsoever. If you trademarked blockclock and not btcclock, you are SOL. If anything NVK's concern falls under copyright, and copyright only protects actual artwork such as the specific design, exact dimensions, shape and color of the blockclock. All three are in the category of intellectual property under US federal statutes, but trademark is specific to allowing a company to protect an identifying mark they use to distinguish their product or business activity. NVK's beef appears to be that someone else made a cheaper blockclock, called it something else and didn't infringe on any of his intellectual property whatsoever, so unless he can prove otherwise he can cry harder for all I care.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90900261&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch Broadly describing your product in your trademark registration doesn't mean you can prevent competitors from making a similar product under a different name