| > It's low in the same way that if a non-profit starts to use your IP or trademarks you must go after them for doing so. Incidentally, this is common legal advice on Internet forums, but is not really true, as lawyers like DannyBee have explained more than once in other threads. It's a misconception that litigating companies tacitly condone, because it paints them in a more sympathetic light, but it's not actually "required" by any stretch of imagination. If your mark is actually at risk of losing secondary meaning, then there is a risk to not doing so, but it takes a long time to get to that point. It's like saying that every time you have a beer, you're slowly developing cirrhosis - unless you're already drinking heavily and have been for a while, a single drink has literally no impact[0]. Also, since you say "IP or trademarks", not just trademarks, you're applying this principle to copyright and patents, which is also not true at all. Failure to enforce copyright rights is not tantamount to a free, irrevocable license. > View this from the position of a business with investors they're beholden to, not from an emotional standpoint. I'm viewing it with the exactly the same line of thinking that got us these antidiscrimination and labor protection laws in the first place. [0] The liver is capable of regeneration, and cirrhosis only happens if you repeatedly subject it to levels of alcohol that it can't regenerate from faster than your intake. Likewise, losing secondary meaning isn't going to happen because you failed to go after a small non-profit that was using your mark in a way that wasn't really intended to confuse customers with your mark in the first place. |