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by jvehent 866 days ago
Don't called your project *Zilla. The copyright owners of Godzilla are known to go after everyone who tries to use the "Zilla" suffix. Mozilla learned its lesson long ago and had to negotiate a special agreement.
6 comments

Um, wow, I had no idea. I've got some other pretty good domain names at the ready, so, maybe I need to pull the trigger on that.
As an 10 year Mozilla veteran, I agree you should switch domains/project names. Mozilla was able to negotiate a deal for a number of reasons- Mitchell herself is a lawyer, the project is a NPO, and probably other reasons too, but it's not worth the effort to defend a slightly infringing name against the copyright holder in this case.
Using this thread as bug report.

There is a typo on the “Credits” card on game pages: ”arist” -> ”artist”

Thanks Soneca. Fixed and deployed.
Hi Josh,

I'm receiving an error upon accessing the page.

Object.hasOwn is not a function. (In 'Object.hasOwn(t,n)', 'Object.hasOwn' is undefined)

Your browser is too old to work with the library. Object.hasOwn is available for 93% of users according to https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_object_hasown
Polyfill added btw, happy to take any more bug reports either here or in discord and thanks!
I'm going to add a polyfill later for this. Thanks for the bug reports
How would this even remotely relate to Godzilla or it’s copyright?

It’s not even close to a big scary nuclear fueled monster.

I’ll note that the only TM case they ever lost was against a company selling trash bags named ‘trashzilla’, partially because it did not constitute a danger to Toho’s business interests.

Edit: Uh, I missed the logo. Definitely a problem.

Woah, this is wild. Never knew how aggressive the copyrights were for *Zilla.
When you consider the most recent Godzilla film, Minus One, is the 37th in that franchise, and was not only nominated for an Oscar, and may be it's most lucrative, you can see why Toho would aggressively police that copyright.

Minus One is legit a great film.

No, I can't. That makes it even less reasonable.

Edit: on the other hand, they apparently elected to use Godzilla as their logo, which kind of ruins the otherwise considerable unrelatedness.

Wonder how the people of Zillah Washington feel about it
I'm fairly sure that the antiquity of the Book of Genesis trumps any conceivable trademark claim!
It’s not called Boardzillah, so maybe not much at all.
Meant more about Godzilla copyright holders being litigious
Ah. I assume their trademark doesn’t extend to cities, but no doubt someone’s issued a legal threat and retracted it at least once!
Meta also pursues trademarks applicants for trademarks ending in 'book' as well.
That seems a lot more dubious than the *zilla trademark.
Revzilla and Partzilla also had a long legal conflict over the *zilla name.
It's pretty clear that "zilla" is a genericised word suffix, cf "bridezilla", in English.

Whilst it seems to originate with Godzilla -- which honestly also doesn't seem to associate with a particular company but instead I would say it's a now traditional monster name in stories, like Dracula -- noone is confusing this with any Godzilla franchise. These sort of attempts to own a word sten, across trademark categories, are an over-step that legislators need to rein in IMO.

Does the recent Sky trademark battle speak to this?

This comment is entirely my opinion and does not relate to my employer.

> Whilst it seems to originate with Godzilla -- which honestly also doesn't seem to associate with a particular company but instead I would say it's a now traditional monster name in stories, like Dracula

This is a really weird take. Dracula is in the public domain, while every piece of Godzilla media is still copyrighted and trademarked to Toho, one of the big four movie studios of Japan.

What do you find “really weird”?

Dracula debuted in 1897 while Godzilla debuted in 1954.

Isn’t this the main reason one is public domain already and the other is not?

oh crap