"Trademarks and patents have picked up a bad reputation in recent months thanks to patent trolls that actively sue larger companies as a way to make money."
Huh? What on earth do trademarks have to do with patent trolls?
Trademarks are easily the most sensible and best-designed area of IP law there is, even if they have issues.
The only trademark-related controversy I can remember on HN is over "App Store", which is a gray area no matter which side you fall on.
Came here to say exactly that but you beat me to it, strikes me as an attempt to crowbar in some semi-related patent stuff to pad out the article.
The writer has published two articles today, this one and a 4 page one about Diablo. Four articles yesterday, 3 the day before, 4 the day before that.
I picked a few out covering topics I know something about and they seem to be just press release + wikipedia + a few of the top google results mashed into a blog post.
For example: 2 days ago there was an article about Netflix's new game rentals having a "short shelf life" because of "cloud gaming" being just around the corner which was pretty laughably ignorant. It strikes me as a way to use the netflix news to push cloud gaming because someone involved is an investor in some cloud gaming platform. The only alternative is stupidity which is an improvement over a complete lack of ethics, but I can't imagine a realistic type of ignorance or fanboyism that would lead to someone writing this article honestly.
a rambling video chat that seemed done more to get a chance to promote the videoconference sponsor than because anyone had anything to actually say.
No mention whatsoever of journalism or how it differs from just writing. The closest they got was one mention (by the author of the piece this thread is about) of how nice it is to not have to deal with that annoying fact checking thing like he did at reuters.
Agreed. I can't figure out if it is extreme ignorance, or an attempt to confuse, that is the cause of this bizarre conflation of unrelated topics. It's either evil or stupid...I just can't tell which.
There are plenty of trademarks I think are questionable, particularly ones where a company will trademark a commonly used word for their product (Windows and Office spring to mind, though I'm not anti-MS), but I agree that trademarks are the most sensible of the major IP categories.
Also just practically speaking it is much easier and safer to research trademarks ahead of time and if things still go wrong it is easier to just rename something (especially if you're in an early stage) if you run into a conflict than it is to try to recreate whatever your product is from scratch as you would if you ran into a submarine patent.
Meh. It's as generic of a term as "Windows"; why can't every service everywhere be able to have "huddles" if they feel like it? That would make too much sense....
“They very quickly came back to us with a message that they would be renaming the service, although this was ‘an internal business decision’ and nothing to do with our trademark ownership.”
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadHuh? What on earth do trademarks have to do with patent trolls?
Trademarks are easily the most sensible and best-designed area of IP law there is, even if they have issues.
The only trademark-related controversy I can remember on HN is over "App Store", which is a gray area no matter which side you fall on.
The writer has published two articles today, this one and a 4 page one about Diablo. Four articles yesterday, 3 the day before, 4 the day before that.
I picked a few out covering topics I know something about and they seem to be just press release + wikipedia + a few of the top google results mashed into a blog post.
For example: 2 days ago there was an article about Netflix's new game rentals having a "short shelf life" because of "cloud gaming" being just around the corner which was pretty laughably ignorant. It strikes me as a way to use the netflix news to push cloud gaming because someone involved is an investor in some cloud gaming platform. The only alternative is stupidity which is an improvement over a complete lack of ethics, but I can't imagine a realistic type of ignorance or fanboyism that would lead to someone writing this article honestly.
a rambling video chat that seemed done more to get a chance to promote the videoconference sponsor than because anyone had anything to actually say.
No mention whatsoever of journalism or how it differs from just writing. The closest they got was one mention (by the author of the piece this thread is about) of how nice it is to not have to deal with that annoying fact checking thing like he did at reuters.
Also just practically speaking it is much easier and safer to research trademarks ahead of time and if things still go wrong it is easier to just rename something (especially if you're in an early stage) if you run into a conflict than it is to try to recreate whatever your product is from scratch as you would if you ran into a submarine patent.
“They very quickly came back to us with a message that they would be renaming the service, although this was ‘an internal business decision’ and nothing to do with our trademark ownership.”
Not the most apt title.