[mbanzi]

Thanks for the Kudos (Arduino co-founder here). Most likely they used an external service, which uses an algorithm to decide if a TM is used in the correct way or not. So the so called <profanity-word> lawyer was misguided by the work of a software engineer... anyway.. Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil. The reality is that people make mistakes all day every day, imagine algorithms..:)

[pbhjpbhj]

So, I hired a thug to beat you up, but the instructions I gave them were based on an algorithm, so everything's cool! See, I'm not a crappy violent offender, it was just people I hired and an algorithm.

This is not a valid moral defence.

[code_scrapping]

> Thanks for the Kudos

You're welcome and you deserve it!

> Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil.

I'm really not. But I can imagine that if you're a professional versed in blindly protecting IP - this is what you would do. The decision to do it in that specific way (suing infringement left and right) needs to come from the top and typically is not a decision that a lawyer would make alone. So, 3 scenarios:

1) this is an unsupervised default action of a lawyer that's just applying the law without guidance from management, because that's what they expect that they should be doing.

2) management approves of this and they're short-sighted thinking that the logo IP is more important than the community

3) management decided that they'll make a business move that requires stronger branding and purposefully want to kill the community to monopolize the support.

In case 1 and 2, we can hope that this will be corrected. I really don't like case 3, but again - I was never a very good business-person.

EDIT: Wow, so it was No.2. Glad to see the feedback loop working. But as pointed out by others on this thread - it's not that RPi should not protect themselves and their trademark - it's that they can do it in a better way than sending take-down orders.