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Ask HN: How brand name usernames are handled?

2 points by aswerty ↗ HN
Lo folks,

I've been wondering what are the common strategies used by software companies with regards to handling brand name usernames. For example if we look at Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, IBM, and Microsoft they each have their exact company names as their username on GitHub, Facebook and Twitter. I would be surprised if they were lucky enough to acquire their username on each service by being the first to get there.

So are usernames reserved from the beginning? Are they appropriated from normal users once a high value user wants it? Or do big companies just have people and tools they leverage to protect their brand name as new products and technologies come out?

It looks to me that it is in the interest of both the service provider and the business customer to allow big brands have the username that is their exact, or near exact, name. On the other hand it isn't obvious as to what the general approach to doing this is.

7 comments

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Someone1234
To some extent regardless of how you feel about the "Big Guy Vs. the Little Guy" arguments these big organisations do have a legitimate trademark claim over the term and someone could use the username with the intention of misleading others.

It isn't reasonable to assume you'll be able to reserve every single trademarked username. So all you can do is have a policy and process in place to handle trademark complaints. You may also want to inform users at sigh-up that usernames subject to trademark complaints may be lost.

Then if the company wants to utilise their trademark as a legitimate representation of that trademark, then I'd likely have a process there also to verify that they are who they say they are.

brudgers
I'd go even further and be proactive. Prohibit names with obvious potential to cause problems during sign up, e.g. fail to validate:

   *google*| *iphone* | *microsoft*
with a "username not available".

It won't entirely avoid the problem -- you can't stop the truly determined from creating problems -- but it will stop the casual lol's.

aswerty
It does seem like a reasonable step to take because any 3rd party who takes such a username does piggy back on the brand reputation of these companies; intentionally or not.
brudgers
There is a Github repository waiting to be made.
lostinpoetics
An interesting question, I would assume this would be governed by the sites TOS which usually prevents "unauthorized" use which implicates trademark issues, which in turn gives TM holders footing to petition the site to remove "offending" account names. For example, github's TOS requires "You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You must not, in the use of the Service, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright or trademark laws)." I would presume that overall most of these would be somewhat "amicable" versus domain squabbles, but that is situation-specific.

One progression is "Amazon" on twitter which appears to have been registered by an unaffiliated developer and transitioned (rather quickly) to Amazon Inc.:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071111010348/http://twitter.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20081127003135/https://twitter.c... https://web.archive.org/web/20090414074613/http://twitter.co...

Not surprisingly, Twitter's TOS at that time was almost identical to github's current TOS: "You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws)."[0]

Some may also remember firefox.com having a thanks message for the domain, which is somewhat in a similar realm.[1]

In short (insert, the usual this is not legal advice disclaimer), companies would leverage existing laws (primarily, or exclusively trademark) to point out TOS breaches to service providers. The TOS provides for "termination" of an account upon breach and the account is effectively transfered to the complaining party. Depending on the parties' attitudes there may be some delay to wind things down etc, but legally the provider can presumably immediately deactivate and transfer as they see fit (subject to the TOS).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071030230315/http://twitter.co... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050215090602/http://www.firefo...

aswerty
Thanks for the answer. I guess it makes sense that it'd come down to trademark law or somesuch.
wise_young_man
Trademarks is generally how it's handled by most big websites. You can usually find something about it in their terms of service.

This is how I've managed to do it in the past working for some companies that had the rights to trademarks.