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by MayeulC 1941 days ago
This is often repeated, but misguided: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

Genericides do occur, but they are rather exceptional, and you generally can't do much about it (imagine the public starting to talk of dashboards as grafanas).

Cease-and-desists should probably be reserbed for severe missuse, such as a competitor selling their product as yours, etc.

2 comments

Even if it were really that easy to fall prey to the genericide rules, couldn't companies fulfill the enforcement obligations more amicably by asking for a nominal fee?

I suppose that might open the door to the party making wider use of the trademarked term though.

On this topic, can someone explain how Elasticsearch got f*cked by AWS which is using their name for their competing hosted ES service?
They may have to change it now since the fork, but before there was no problem since they were not trying to deceive customers, they were running elastic search.

You can sell a Honda with after market parts and still say its a Honda. You just can't sell a Kia and call it a Porsche trying to trick people.