It seems they have judged the potential for "free" marketing to be worth the risk of a backlash from the 4chan community.
Given they are in the business of allowing users to post content, the risk/reward looks to be heavily weighted towards having their service (in the best case!) being spammed with shocking content 24/7. They haven't thought this through.
That's what I'm thinking will happen, in all honesty. 4chan have attacked en masse websites much larger than a startup in the past - and by using the name "Moot" and flat out denying that it has a relation to 4chan, they're putting a lot at stake.
I wonder if they've got any VC backing, because I don't see many investors trying that one on for size.
If your service is meant to handle the communication for forums and comments then two of your biggest challenges will be dealing with spam and to a lesser extent, malicious users. How do you test systems to combat these issues? You would throw test data at them. From their site: "Our servers will handle whatever you throw at them, at no cost." For a person with the appropriate mindset, that's practically a dare.
While it's certainly a long shot that this is their actual intent, it would be one way for them to fine-tune their system.
> It seems they have judged the potential for "free" marketing to be worth the risk of a backlash from the 4chan community.
Moot is a verb. To moot something means "to raise it as a subject for discussion". They're selling discussion forum software with a domain name, moot.it, that essentially means "discuss it". It's a clever, relevant name and domain hack given what they do.
The overlap with Chris Poole's screen name is at least as likely entirely coincidental as it is some scheme to ride off the coattails of Poole.
I wonder whether Moot's lawyer discussed this with him beforehand, or if it's just standard procedure that has attracted a lot of attention this time round.
Secondly, did Moot.it's lawyer threaten to sue Moot's lawyer? Can you do that? Can you sue the lawyers of your opponents? I imagine that could get very nasty.
Yup, if someone threatens to sue you for bullshit, you can sue them, in your own jurisdiction, for declaratory judgement. That way you can save yourself from getting embroiled in a multi-year bullshit case in someone else's jurisdiction, and get a quicker ruling (declaratory judgement) that the threat is indeed bullshit.
I would like to express my opinion on a more general factor that can be seen also in this occasion. I find really interesting the use of screenshots from Google search and other sources from the internet like blogs, forums, twitter facebook etc... on paper to prove something. I get the feeling that this things, used as "Exhibits" or whatever else, are totally out of place, they are permanent ink to save something that is absolutely not permanent like the internet. The internet is not something static, it can change from one day to another, Moot today can be known as a nickname of a person, tomorrow it can totally be the name of a startup. I really feel this are two worlds colliding, we are trying to apply our old laws to a world that doesn't flow as the old one. I don't know why but I wanted to express this.
Either side can produce the evidence, weigh each other's evidence, make their arguments before the court, and ultimately the court makes a decision.... or they decide they're both fucked in certain ways and settle. the way it works, either side can try to make their case... in principle makes sense, the only problem is it takes a lot of time.
I noticed that Exhibit 1 shows a Google search of "Moot", apparently as support to the claim that the term "Moot" is commonly associated with Poole. However, this search was done from a browser logged in by Chris Poole's attorney. Given Google's attempt to provide more personalized results, I wonder how much influence the attorney's relationship has on the search results from Exhibit 1.
It may be a moot point in this case, but considering the changing search landscape, attorney's need to be more careful about how they use Google search results (and others) as evidence.
Interestingly, the second result on DDG for me shows a Wikipedia article, with the following in the content snippet:
"He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot (always written with lower case)."
Yet, the attorney in the letter uses "MOOT", and not "moot". Does letter case matter in this kind of dispute, especially if one convention is predominately used by the plaintiff?
This is irrelevant. I just performed a search for the term 'moot' on Google and Bing. On both sites, I searched in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. I also performed the searches in anonymous and non-anonymous modes in all browsers.
In every case, the wikipedia page for Chris Poole showed up within the top 5 results. His Twitter page and links to 4chan show up in the top 10 results in one order or another in all results as well.
I'm not taking sides either way, but the attorney's logged in status doesn't have any relevance in this instance.
It may not in this case (as I did mention). My point was in reference to the general practice of attorney's using internet data sources that may provide personalized results. In the case of Google, the attorney's relationships and search history (researching 4chan, etc) may influence evidence submitted if not careful.
moot - adjective
1. open to discussion or debate; debatable; doubtful: a moot point.
2. of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic.
3. Chiefly Law . not actual; theoretical; hypothetical.
-Via Dictionary.com
Given the nature of the service (being commenting/discussion) I struggle to see how this would stand up in court, however I'm not a lawyer.
> Without being an expert on the law, it didn’t seem right that an individual could try to strong arm me out of using a name that bears only a tangential relationship to his product and online persona.
I fail to see how "moot", the name of... well, moot's... online persona bears "only a tangential relationship" to said online persona.
> Although I wouldn’t necessarily call 4chan a “Goliath” of the internet, Poole has certainly taken the Goliath position on this.
...just because someone is large, doesn't mean they are de facto wrong or impervious to harm, and it certainly doesn't make it appropriate to try to win the audience with a silly David vs. Goliath analogy: you need a serious argument here, not cute soundbites.
Personally, I feel like moot has a good argument here: what he has been working on for a while now, both with 4chan and Canv.as, is "the future of online discussions"; if I see a company with his name and that same mission, I bet I would have been confused.
The problem here is that "his" name is also a common verb in the English language that means "to raise something for discussion".
I'm not sure he should get to prevent any discussion forum software from using that word, or the clever dns hack moot.it to advertise said software that lets you "discuss it", because he happened to choose a common-ish verb as a screen name, years ago.
> The problem here is that "his" name is also a common verb in the English language that means "to raise something for discussion"
Common? Please can you point to any online usage of the word in that way?
I know lots of people use it to mean "no longer relevant".
> 2. N. Amer. (orig. Law). Of a case, issue, etc.: having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic. Now the usual sense in North America.
Maybe I just spend too much time around lawyer types, or maybe its usage in the original meaning is simply more common in Canada than the US (which, given the amount of UKisms we've retained, isn't unlikely), but I hear it used that way on a fairly regular basis.
"meaningless/irrelevant" is the adjectival form of moot, not the verb, and it's worth reinforcing that this is a usage shift specific to North America. To "moot it" doesn't mean "to make it irrelevant"; rather, things originally became "moot" when they were topics you could argue over but which had no further relevance in the law, and the latter grew to dominate its usage in the adjectival form in North America. But that usage didn't migrate back to the verb, or appear at all abroad.
And there are, of course, the well known "moot courts", so named not because they're "unpractical/irrelevant/meaningless" court but instead because they're forums for the students to debate the law.
"common" is a stretch -- maybe it's common as a regional dialect. Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)
Keep in mind that UPS has successfully trademarked a color, as have many other companies; "Apple" is a trademark, "Time" is a trademark, "Shell" is a trademark, "Caterpillar" is a trademark ... and odds are, as you read each of those common words, you knew exactly which company holds the trademark.
Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
> "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions
That's completely wrong. The majority of the world doesn't know who Moot is. The majority doesn't even know what 4chan is, even if they do start most of the internet memes.
If I asked my mom what "moot" meant, she'd probably tell me something like "something that's no longer relevant or worth arguing about". Using HN comments as a confirmation tool is equally ridiculous. We are not the right community to use when determining the legal usage of a phrase.
While each of the common names your have listed are trademarks, they are trademarks within their respective fields. It would be completely appropriate for me to start a watch shop and call it "Time" (assuming there isn't already a national or state trademark of watch shops called "Time").
Moot is an online persona, not a product. I'm not familiar with New York state law on "public rights of publicity", but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have exclusive rights to the word "Moot".
This would be like Tom from MySpace suing Tom's shoes or TomTom. (Okay, not quite because the company is working on forum software which is close to 4chan, but it's not far off).
You seem to be a pretty smart individual. How could I have made it more clear that I was talking about "moot" in the context of online discussions when I wrote, "in the context of online discussions," which you quoted? Serious question. I seem to be having trouble getting even longtime HN readers to respond to what I actually wrote, instead of what they imagine I wrote. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Unless you're prepared to argue that the majority of the world uses online discussions or talks about online discussion systems, or that a conversation with your mom is a suitable anecdote when talking about online discussions, I think you should reconsider just how "completely wrong" my argument was.
Because, you're right, the examples I cited are trademarks within their respective fields, and that was the entire point of my comment.
I think that the part that I have issue with is that people have been having online discussions for far longer than moot has been around (hell, probably even alive). Unless you are aware of 4chan, you'd probably never even heard of him outside of a few news articles. 4chan and moot are well known within their own realms, but in reality, it is a small fraction of the "online discussion" world. So, when you're looking at applying trademark-level protection, it's not appropriate to look at the smaller realm, but rather the environment as a whole.
This all seems like a big-fish, small-pond vs. small-fish, medium-pond argument to me.
Moot maybe incredibly influential in his corner of the 'net, but the larger world probably doesn't know him. Moreover, the brand of his product isn't "moot", it's 4chan. To top it off, "moot" isn't a rare word, it's a commonly used word in English. All of this combines to make it very difficult for him to try to make any direct claims against Moot.it.
>"common" is a stretch -- maybe it's common as a regional dialect.
Some googling and brief dives into etymological references are suggesting to me that the original usage is more common in Canada and the UK than the US.
> Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)
Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.
> Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
I don't disagree. But note that it's Chris Poole's lawyer who's claiming that Moot can't be used as a trademark on the basis that Chris Poole and his screen name are so famous that they're entitled to Right of Publicity protection under New York law, which strikes me as stretching that law rather past its original intent (is Rand Corporation violating Paul Rand's Right of Publicity? Does Richard Gere have a case against Top Gear?).
> Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.
4Chan has 22 million uniques per month and a million posts per day [1], and seems to be referenced regularly on all of the other "big" online forum sites. And, when Time gave in and acknowledged the poll results for Christopher Poole as their most influential person of the year, they referred to him first as "moot" and the stunt picked up coverage in mainstream publications like the LA Times [2].
So, I think you may be underestimating 4Chan's influence. But, I'll concede that I may be overestimating it as well.
The difference may be that Apple is not selling fruit, Shell crustaceans, nor Caterpillar butterflies; so their trademarks are presumably easier to justify.
To suggest that a person owns a dictionary definition of a word that predates their existence by ~800 years[1] smacks of hubris
So are "apple", "time" and "caterpillar", yet they are all federally registered trademarks whose holders have successfully prosecuted others for their use. Being a common word is not an absolute barrier to trademark protection.
You don't necessarily need to register a trademark in order to defend it (although you do need to defend it once it's registered unless you want to risk using it).
From Wikipedia:
> In the United States, neither federal nor state registration is required to obtain rights in a trademark. An unregistered mark may still receive common law trademark rights. Those rights, for example, may extend to its area of influence—usually delineated by geography. As such, multiple parties may simultaneously use a mark throughout the country or even state. An unregistered mark may also be protected under the federal "Lanham Act" (15 USC § 1125) prohibition against commercial misrepresentation of source or origins of goods. Unregistered marks are also protectable in the United States under Lanham Act §43(a).
But those are huge and well-established brands; using their names is likely in some cases to cause confusion amongst consumers. Preventing such confusion is, as far as I'm aware, the goal of trademark law.
Moot-the-person on the other hand is quite obscure; nobody knows who he is or associates the word "moot" with him other than a small handful of people in one online community. I.e. it's not a well-established brand, and using the word isn't likely to cause confusion or mis-association for the general public.
To the general public, no, but in this case the product is similar to 4chan, so users may be confused. If Moot.It had sold server hardware instead, I'm sure there would be no valid case.
They have respectfully suggested a name change because they know they do not have a strong case. I find the letter a surprising move from someone so aligned with internet counter-culture.
I think it's fair to say that a large majority of internet users would have no idea of the founder of 4chan. Plus the term is being used in a descriptive allusive sense from what I can tell. A firm rebuttal is in order.
As someone who's heard the name "moot", I would have (prior to reading this article, which shows otherwise) assumed that a service named "moot.it" offering discussion forums is associated with Moot/Chris Poole.
Preventing this kind of confusion is the entire point of Trademark law, and whether the company's name did this intentionally or not, I think Moot has a reasonable cause for concern and case.
Trade mark law seeks to balance the interests of people with distinctive brands to protect against the interests of the wider public in being able to use words in a descriptive sense to describe their product.
I personally think moot is very much descriptive of the 'discussion' in general. Moot, the 4chan creator would most probably argue the name has acquired distinctiveness through usage but this generally requires a high evidential threshold in terms of the reasonable person having familiarity with the term as a unique identifier. Whilst if 4chan had been called moot from the start he would have had a stronger case, I do not think the reasonable internet user would be aware of moot's name let alone identify it with online discussion.
They have "respectfully suggested" because there is no infringing use to sue over yet, and they likely prefer that the startup change it's name to a drawn out legal battle - it's better for both parties.
There is quite a strong case I think. Moot is the online brand of a person who runs one of the most popular forums on the internet. Starting a forum service with his name is quite clearly in a grey area if not outright infringement.
Sending a letter without outlining your legal position is precisely the kind of approach which could lead to a drawn out legal battle. Outlining your legal position in terms of agreed law will help to remove ambiguity and opinion from the equation and help the other side to better assess the merits of the case. In my opinion this hasn't been done because case law is not on moot's side.
However the main reason why there will be not be a long drawn out battle is because there are likely to be no damages and moot.it are unlikely to have any real assets.
I think Moot.It should strongly consider the likelihood that they will be LOIC'd to death before they even are able to make enough customers to pay to get unDDoS'd to begin with.
There aren't really many groups I'd be worried about pissing off en masse as a startup except perhaps anonymous.
Firm legal standing or not, getting confused with 4chan probably isn't a good idea for any startup. IMO the largest worry for Moot.it is risking some sort of retaliation from 4chan's user base. They are excellent at shitting things up.
I actually think 4chaners might react against Christopher/moot. Anon stands very specifically for complete and total freedom of speech. Saying "whatever the fuck you want" is more important to anon than protecting some imaginary trademark moot thinks he has.
Entirely possible, although Moot.it has far more to lose than moot himself. I get the impression that Moot.it is playing with fire in order to stir up some free publicity. I personally don't think it's worth the risk.
It's difficult to say what Anonymous stands for, because it's not a single organisation or group. Anyone can take the label of Anonymous when advocating a cause, and "become part of it".
Before Anonymous got "good guy" publicity for supporting Wikileaks, people calling themselves anonymous were mostly known for trolling: finding emotionally sensitive people and communities, and harassing them both online and offline for their own amusement.
The first things that came to my mind was they would likely try to destroy the brand by buying every moot.* domain and associating it with unsavory things, flooding sites that use moot.it with horrendous crap, and DDoS attacks.
The userbase has always been about schadenfreudic justice and retribution from a perceived slight of the day. moot - or rather, his attorney - fits the bill to a t.
It would be if it did, but it doesn't. Both technologies are pretty neat, but if you go check out each of them you will notice that they are very different. Canvas is an image-centric social website, which also does a significant amount to replace desktop editing tools for desktop. While moot is Disqus with websockets.
Edit: Oh, and a forum component. Also, I think Moot.it are trying to sell a product, while Poole seems to be building another community.
Maybe competes was the wrong word. I was speaking more about the trademark itself. Technically they'd both be in the same "class," so Poole has more ammo for first usage, Etc.
Quite ridiculous. Actually yoomoot.com would be more entitled to send such a letter than Poole. Now everyone who was nicknamed 'Shorty' in college back in 82 will start suing everything what moves.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadGiven they are in the business of allowing users to post content, the risk/reward looks to be heavily weighted towards having their service (in the best case!) being spammed with shocking content 24/7. They haven't thought this through.
I wonder if they've got any VC backing, because I don't see many investors trying that one on for size.
If your service is meant to handle the communication for forums and comments then two of your biggest challenges will be dealing with spam and to a lesser extent, malicious users. How do you test systems to combat these issues? You would throw test data at them. From their site: "Our servers will handle whatever you throw at them, at no cost." For a person with the appropriate mindset, that's practically a dare.
While it's certainly a long shot that this is their actual intent, it would be one way for them to fine-tune their system.
Moot is a verb. To moot something means "to raise it as a subject for discussion". They're selling discussion forum software with a domain name, moot.it, that essentially means "discuss it". It's a clever, relevant name and domain hack given what they do.
The overlap with Chris Poole's screen name is at least as likely entirely coincidental as it is some scheme to ride off the coattails of Poole.
Secondly, did Moot.it's lawyer threaten to sue Moot's lawyer? Can you do that? Can you sue the lawyers of your opponents? I imagine that could get very nasty.
The federal government, for one.
It may be a moot point in this case, but considering the changing search landscape, attorney's need to be more careful about how they use Google search results (and others) as evidence.
"He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot (always written with lower case)."
Yet, the attorney in the letter uses "MOOT", and not "moot". Does letter case matter in this kind of dispute, especially if one convention is predominately used by the plaintiff?
In every case, the wikipedia page for Chris Poole showed up within the top 5 results. His Twitter page and links to 4chan show up in the top 10 results in one order or another in all results as well.
I'm not taking sides either way, but the attorney's logged in status doesn't have any relevance in this instance.
I see what you did there.
-Via Dictionary.com
Given the nature of the service (being commenting/discussion) I struggle to see how this would stand up in court, however I'm not a lawyer.
I fail to see how "moot", the name of... well, moot's... online persona bears "only a tangential relationship" to said online persona.
> Although I wouldn’t necessarily call 4chan a “Goliath” of the internet, Poole has certainly taken the Goliath position on this.
...just because someone is large, doesn't mean they are de facto wrong or impervious to harm, and it certainly doesn't make it appropriate to try to win the audience with a silly David vs. Goliath analogy: you need a serious argument here, not cute soundbites.
Personally, I feel like moot has a good argument here: what he has been working on for a while now, both with 4chan and Canv.as, is "the future of online discussions"; if I see a company with his name and that same mission, I bet I would have been confused.
I'm not sure he should get to prevent any discussion forum software from using that word, or the clever dns hack moot.it to advertise said software that lets you "discuss it", because he happened to choose a common-ish verb as a screen name, years ago.
Common? Please can you point to any online usage of the word in that way?
I know lots of people use it to mean "no longer relevant".
> 2. N. Amer. (orig. Law). Of a case, issue, etc.: having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic. Now the usual sense in North America.
"meaningless/irrelevant" is the adjectival form of moot, not the verb, and it's worth reinforcing that this is a usage shift specific to North America. To "moot it" doesn't mean "to make it irrelevant"; rather, things originally became "moot" when they were topics you could argue over but which had no further relevance in the law, and the latter grew to dominate its usage in the adjectival form in North America. But that usage didn't migrate back to the verb, or appear at all abroad.
Here's a usage in verbal noun form to mean "a meeting for discussion": http://www.themagicboxstore.com/paganmoot.htm
And there are, of course, the well known "moot courts", so named not because they're "unpractical/irrelevant/meaningless" court but instead because they're forums for the students to debate the law.
Keep in mind that UPS has successfully trademarked a color, as have many other companies; "Apple" is a trademark, "Time" is a trademark, "Shell" is a trademark, "Caterpillar" is a trademark ... and odds are, as you read each of those common words, you knew exactly which company holds the trademark.
Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
That's completely wrong. The majority of the world doesn't know who Moot is. The majority doesn't even know what 4chan is, even if they do start most of the internet memes.
If I asked my mom what "moot" meant, she'd probably tell me something like "something that's no longer relevant or worth arguing about". Using HN comments as a confirmation tool is equally ridiculous. We are not the right community to use when determining the legal usage of a phrase.
While each of the common names your have listed are trademarks, they are trademarks within their respective fields. It would be completely appropriate for me to start a watch shop and call it "Time" (assuming there isn't already a national or state trademark of watch shops called "Time").
Moot is an online persona, not a product. I'm not familiar with New York state law on "public rights of publicity", but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have exclusive rights to the word "Moot".
This would be like Tom from MySpace suing Tom's shoes or TomTom. (Okay, not quite because the company is working on forum software which is close to 4chan, but it's not far off).
Unless you're prepared to argue that the majority of the world uses online discussions or talks about online discussion systems, or that a conversation with your mom is a suitable anecdote when talking about online discussions, I think you should reconsider just how "completely wrong" my argument was.
Because, you're right, the examples I cited are trademarks within their respective fields, and that was the entire point of my comment.
I apologize for not making that more clear.
This all seems like a big-fish, small-pond vs. small-fish, medium-pond argument to me.
Moot maybe incredibly influential in his corner of the 'net, but the larger world probably doesn't know him. Moreover, the brand of his product isn't "moot", it's 4chan. To top it off, "moot" isn't a rare word, it's a commonly used word in English. All of this combines to make it very difficult for him to try to make any direct claims against Moot.it.
Some googling and brief dives into etymological references are suggesting to me that the original usage is more common in Canada and the UK than the US.
> Regardless, that's somewhat irrelevant: "moot" is far more commonly used to refer to Christopher Poole in the context of online discussions. (Even a quick glance at the search results of e.g. HN comments with the term "moot" confirms this.)
Eh, I think you're overgeneralizing from your own perspective here (and searching HN to back yourself up is only magnifying, not mitigating, that effect). There's an awful lot of English-speaking internet out there beyond the bubble that wouldn't know 4chan from foursquare.
> Whether or not "moot" should be a trademark is largely philosophical and not a debate I feel like putting any energy into. However, that moot can be a trademark even if it's a "common" word seems obvious at this point.
I don't disagree. But note that it's Chris Poole's lawyer who's claiming that Moot can't be used as a trademark on the basis that Chris Poole and his screen name are so famous that they're entitled to Right of Publicity protection under New York law, which strikes me as stretching that law rather past its original intent (is Rand Corporation violating Paul Rand's Right of Publicity? Does Richard Gere have a case against Top Gear?).
4Chan has 22 million uniques per month and a million posts per day [1], and seems to be referenced regularly on all of the other "big" online forum sites. And, when Time gave in and acknowledged the poll results for Christopher Poole as their most influential person of the year, they referred to him first as "moot" and the stunt picked up coverage in mainstream publications like the LA Times [2].
So, I think you may be underestimating 4Chan's influence. But, I'll concede that I may be overestimating it as well.
[1]: http://www.4chan.org/advertise [2]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/04/4chan-tim...
To suggest that a person owns a dictionary definition of a word that predates their existence by ~800 years[1] smacks of hubris
[1] OED
From Wikipedia:
> In the United States, neither federal nor state registration is required to obtain rights in a trademark. An unregistered mark may still receive common law trademark rights. Those rights, for example, may extend to its area of influence—usually delineated by geography. As such, multiple parties may simultaneously use a mark throughout the country or even state. An unregistered mark may also be protected under the federal "Lanham Act" (15 USC § 1125) prohibition against commercial misrepresentation of source or origins of goods. Unregistered marks are also protectable in the United States under Lanham Act §43(a).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trade_mark
Moot-the-person on the other hand is quite obscure; nobody knows who he is or associates the word "moot" with him other than a small handful of people in one online community. I.e. it's not a well-established brand, and using the word isn't likely to cause confusion or mis-association for the general public.
I think it's fair to say that a large majority of internet users would have no idea of the founder of 4chan. Plus the term is being used in a descriptive allusive sense from what I can tell. A firm rebuttal is in order.
Preventing this kind of confusion is the entire point of Trademark law, and whether the company's name did this intentionally or not, I think Moot has a reasonable cause for concern and case.
I personally think moot is very much descriptive of the 'discussion' in general. Moot, the 4chan creator would most probably argue the name has acquired distinctiveness through usage but this generally requires a high evidential threshold in terms of the reasonable person having familiarity with the term as a unique identifier. Whilst if 4chan had been called moot from the start he would have had a stronger case, I do not think the reasonable internet user would be aware of moot's name let alone identify it with online discussion.
There is quite a strong case I think. Moot is the online brand of a person who runs one of the most popular forums on the internet. Starting a forum service with his name is quite clearly in a grey area if not outright infringement.
However the main reason why there will be not be a long drawn out battle is because there are likely to be no damages and moot.it are unlikely to have any real assets.
There aren't really many groups I'd be worried about pissing off en masse as a startup except perhaps anonymous.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/31/anonymous_french_fir...
I don't know what has happened after these threats.
Before Anonymous got "good guy" publicity for supporting Wikileaks, people calling themselves anonymous were mostly known for trolling: finding emotionally sensitive people and communities, and harassing them both online and offline for their own amusement.
Ultimately Moot could use his social clout to get them to switch names. IANAL but I'm pretty sure it's a legal name.
Edit: Oh, and a forum component. Also, I think Moot.it are trying to sell a product, while Poole seems to be building another community.