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by animex 539 days ago
IANAL,but naming your product S2 and mentioning in the intro that AWS S3 is the tech you are enhancing is probably looking for a branding/copyright claim from Amazon. Same vertical & definitely will cause consumer confusion. I'm sure you've done the research about whether a trademark has been registered.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=98324800&caseSearchType=U...

8 comments

Fun fact: S2 and EC2 sound exactly the same in Spanish - both are "ese dos". Add that to EC2 and S3 already being confusing to tell apart by ear
Only for you lot of Thouth-american thpanish thpeakerth.
not for non latin american speakers.
TBF, building something with the goal of enhancing S3 I would call it S4.
Thats short term thinking. you need to leapfrog everybody and go s∞
That’s actually a pretty cool name if you pronounce the first letter the letter sound rather than as an initial: Sinfinity
Sounds more like a porn website...
Very responsive log porn. ;-)
My aging eyes just pronounced it "sooooo"
Too late, name's taken for something else: https://incubator.apache.org/projects/s4.html
And don't forget the other S4: http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/

It's like S3, except better because, by focusing on being a write-only data store, they can manage much more throughput and efficiency, plus your data is far more secure at rest than it is in S3.

How about the other other S4 https://adv-r.hadley.nz/s4.html
I would really like to know how many people send money through that paypal link
Try clicking on it.
Ah, thank you :)
why not s11?
S3++ ? T4?

My company is a Fivetran client, and they named that company after a (bad) joke, but it's worth a fortune.

Fivetran is going to zero because they don’t offer anything of actual value and their CEO isn’t a good person.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434450

F3 - (Fast Furious Fail-Safe)
At least cloudflare’s R2 has an argument for the naming (IBM vs HAL, A Space Odyssey)
I'm not sure whether they consulted a bad trademark lawyer or didn't consult one at all, but it wouldn't have cost that much to do so. I say this having just recently started the process of filing a trademark - the cost is about the same as buying i.e. 's4.dev' according to the domain registry's website.

Having to rebrand your product after launching is a lot more painful than doing it before launching.

OR

Amazon just builds the same thing, calls it S3 Streams, and doesn’t care about S2.

Maybe they make a buyout offer.

I highly doubt they would sue.

Trademark law encourages companies to defend their marks. If they don’t, they may lose the trademark. So Amazon has to write these guys a letter if it wants to defend the s3 trademark.
Amazon might write a letter, but if the tech is solid, they’ll probably just work with them.
s3 (serverless stream store)
What could possibly be better than being sued by Amazon for some nitpicky naming Issue ?

That’s the kind of David vs. Goliath publicity one could only dream of …

98% of the time, law suits are just a money pit. There is zero publicity. A tiny number go viral. I don't think this is likely to be one of those times.

Most people would simply say "Amazon is right." Because Amazon is right. This is an intentional attempt to leverage their product branding to promote a new product. There is very little good here.

If this were open-source, academic, non-profit, or something like that, perhaps. A small venture trying to commercialize on some digital equivalent of Amazon's trade dress? I can't imagine anyone would care....

Even those times when someone is 100% right, usually, there is zero publicity. Right or wrong, most times I've seen, the small guy would settle with the big guy with the deep legal pockets and move on because litigating is too expensive.

In a situation like this one, your marketing spend / press coverage on the existing name is shot, links to your domain are shot, and perhaps you have an egg on your face, depending on how things play out.

Yep, letter S and a number is copyrighted, can't do that
1) we're talking about trademark law, not copyright law.

2) the problem here is that they're in the same business segment, and explicitly reference S3.

S3. But trademark law prevents subtle variations.

E.g. creating a product called “Gooogle”