Company Takes Over Well-Known OSS Developer's Name Because the Domain Was Free 99
New submitter Fatalis writes: Substack is a venture capital funded startup for subscription-based newsletters, and it admittedly chose its name following the advice from a Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator) article to prefer names not registered in the .com zone. The same name has also been the user handle for a prolific open-source developer who now finds themselves competing for recognition in the tech space with a capital backed company. The lesson seems to be for developers to protect their personal brand by registering a domain name with the .com extension due to it being perceived as the default.
Use your real name, not a handle (Score:1, Insightful)
Better yet, use your real name.
(Not following my own advice here. Posting as AC simply because I don't want a Slashdot account.)
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My real name is Micro Soft. (Getting dates with that name is not easy.)
Re:Use your real name, not a handle (Score:5, Informative)
Except they can and did [wikipedia.org].
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If you're a heterosexual man and/or dislike sucking cocks then sucking them is indeed a bad thing. So no, no homophobia at all.
Anyway, he was referencing an all time bash.org favourite.
http://bash.org/?5775 [bash.org]
Re: Use your real name, not a handle (Score:2)
It seems that in TFS, more than one name is needed, given it referrs to the developer in the plural.
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Horrible advice. Using your real name would only make it easier for you to be cyberstalked/doxed etc. If you care about your privacy you never use your real name online. Secondly you cannot trademark your name so using your real name wouldn't prevent that company from using your online persona which is the issue here.
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But he's already using his name. It says "James Halliday" right on his Github page. The headline says "well-known OSS developer". He's not interested in anonymity, in fact quite the opposite, it sounds like he wants credit for his work, like a lot of people. There's not much reason to use a handle at all. Especially if he's trying to protect his work. If I put "copyright amicusNYCL" on something, I really doubt that would hold up in court.
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Copyright and trade mark work differently. In this case, it is about trade mark because it is not about the content but rather the name only.
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Why not? It's your pseudonym, so it's still you.
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OK, but if the purpose is anonymity, like the person I replied to said "you never use your real name online", then how am I going to both stay anonymous and also protect my work? If I'm going to sue someone for infringement, don't I have to prove that I have the right to do so? How do I do that while staying anonymous?
Re: Use your real name, not a handle (Score:2)
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What you call my "real name" is the handle my parents selected for me. It happens to be based on anglicized Hebrew, as is typical of names of European Christians. Except I'm not Christian, my most ancient ancestors were not Christian, and I was not born in medieval Europe.
In contrast, the handle I've selected for myself does have significance to me and is related to my own personal events.
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the handle I've selected for myself does have significance to me and is related to my own personal events
Oooh, can we guess?
I'm going with "You were the captain of a freighter full of Irn-Bru that got caught on rocks near the Isles of Scilly and caused an ecological disaster."
There's another way to protect a brand (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson seems to be for developers to protect their personal brand by registering a domain name with the .com extension due to it being perceived as the default.
If your handle is really a brand and important to preserve, then register it with the US Patent & Trademark Office. You can register the .com, but you don't need to in order to protect yourself. If it's not important enough for all that, then maybe your "personal brand" is not that important at all.
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And buying the domain without registering a trademark just makes you a squatter if you can't afford fancy lawyers.
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That seems pretty reasonable, if you wanted to start substack financial news, I would either assume that it is a different company. Nobody is going to confuse Columbia House with Columbia School Source as one is music, the other is school furniture. In this case they opened a new company that happens to have the handle of a guy who is well known in a specific community. What happens when a new airline company starts up that has the same name as the handle of an aviation webforum administrator "FlyBob"? How
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It costs hardly anything to set up a company, just set up a company with your name and do your work under that.
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That doesn't protect your name.
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You're saying that if he registered and did business under a company called Substack, Inc., then he wouldn't be protected against someone else starting a company called Substack? That's great news. As a developer of software for microcomputers, I'm going to start a company called Micro-Soft. Sounds pretty catchy.
Sucks if you have a popular name. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or in my case a name of a sports star. However the persons name has always been tricky in the domain world.
Just if Microsoft tried to sue MikeRowe.com Because the actor MikeRowe phonically is similar.
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And, fortunately, anonimouscoward.com, anonymuscoward.com, and anonymousecoward.com are all available.
However, sad to say that plugh.com and xyzzy.com are long gone.
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Just if Microsoft tried to sue MikeRowe.com Because the actor MikeRowe phonically is similar.
They did sue Mike Rowe [wikipedia.org], but not the celebrity and not MikeRowe.com. It was a student who registered MikeRoweSoft.com.
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That's not what this case is about though. The "name" the developer had taken was a handle - substack. I don't in this case think this is much to get worked up about.
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Fun history:
Nissan vs. Nissan
Some dude with the last name of Nissan owned a web site and used it to promote his software contracting business. His name is also the name of an automotive company. The man offset costs of operating the web site by displaying advertisements. The advertisements were handled by a third-party advertising network, but had no filtering in terms of what was advertised. As such his site would sometimes display advertisements for cars, which were not always Nissan cars. Nissan automoti
And? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't expect to own my username unless I copyright it, nor should you. Open source developers, no matter how prolific, just have handles like the rest of us open source developers and -- *shock* -- gamers.
Linked in the summary, his own public (and therefore open source) GitHub history doesn't backup being a prolific open source developer anymore and hasn't been for the past ~1.5 years. Plus I have no idea who the heck he is and I cannot tell if his real name is James Halliday, or if he took that name as a joke after Ready Player One.
Well known to you is not necessarily well known to the world. He seems like he's probably popular in the JS community, but how that makes this a remotely serious issue is still unknown to me. Copyright your name if you want to own and probably buy the .com domain while you're at it. Otherwise you clearly didn't care enough about your name to actually own it.
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I don't expect to own my username unless I copyright it, nor should you.
That would be a trademark you'd want. There's not much content there to copyright.
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The 200 IQ play is to patent the concept of even having a name in the first place.
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I don't expect to own my username unless I copyright it
Copyrighting (you mean trademarking) does not automatically provide you ownership of a name in many scenarios. If this is a case of simply being pissed off about the domain then he should have bought the domain. No need to copyright anything. Nissan with all the lawyers and trademarks in the world couldn't get ownership of www.nissan.com for this very reason.
this is too much. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now you have to make sure your new company name or product doesn't collide with a fucking internet user handle? Nope. If your handle is important enough to you, trademark it or stfu.
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:qvpw13.2.1
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Even that may not be good enough, as multiple people can own the same trademark. For example, famously there is more than one company with the "Apple" trademark. This is okay because they are in different industries and don't compete with each other (well... sort of). The problem, of course, is there is only one apple.com.
So basically if you go that route, you'll want to make up a word for you're handle. That way you'll have a much stronger trademark. That'll also preclude you from using your actual na
So? (Score:1)
More slashdot anti-capitalist bias on display here. Who the fuck cares if this loser lost his web page? If he refused to pay for it or didn't keep up, then he got what he deserved. End of story.
In Other News . . . (Score:2, Informative)
The Internet is a Big Place, and just because you think you are important in your little niche, you really aren't.
"Well-known OSS developer"? Yeah, right. That and $8 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.
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Unless writing "substack" on a paper cup gets you branded as a bigot.
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whoa, I've been saying that as $5 at Starbucks for years...is coffee at Starbucks that expensive now??
I drink tea so out of touch.
JS developer (Score:1)
We are talking about a JS developer. That should be end of story for /....
This makes all domains pointless (Score:2)
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I had a company's name for an Apple ID once (Score:2)
Years ago, and before the iPhone and the app store, I used a handle for a variety of online accounts that happened to be the same as the name as a particular company which was unrelated to anything computers, software, or the internet. I used this handle to create an account with the Apple web site, which years later Apple later turned into a more general ID scheme that granted access to the developer tools and the ability to publish apps. Suddenly during the app boom I started getting emails about lost p
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I'm assuming that they wanted the handle and were trying to determine if some employee or marketdroid had unofficially obtained it on their behalf (looking for reset emails being delivered into an employee email account) rather than trying to hack their way into it. I've had occasions where a UID was registered and I honestly thought that I personally might have been the
NBD (Score:2)
So they took the .com. So what? It DOES NOT MATTER that someone uses that handle elsewhere. Trademark might not have even helped -- one guy writes JS stuff, the other company does email newsletters. Yes, they are both "on computers", but what isn't these days? If 'substack' (the guy) wanted the name, he could have had it years ago for a few bucks. The fact that he didn't register it is a good indication that HE DOESN'T FUCKING CARE, ergo, no big deal.
Unless I'm missing something, HE didn't even complain --
This would be illegal in Germany ... (Score:2)
... especially so if it is blatantly obvious that the company registered the domain in order to cash in on his name and both work in the same field. This is obvious quasi fraudulent malintent. This domain ownership would be cancelled in 5 minutes in any German court.
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You need to read this (Score:1)
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ [kalzumeus.com]
Fake News for Nerds (Score:2)
The attempt at manufactured controversy is transparent. If this developer ever valued that domain name at more than $10 he would have registered it. If he had the company would have a different domain.
I bet what it will happen (Score:2)