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Comment by jamescun | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense from a trademark perspective, you either protect it or lose it.

However I think, particularly for a project that supposedly highly values open source, to go straight to lawyers is a very poor show on Docker Inc's part. An email referring to their guidelines or even chiming in on the project/issue thread on GitHub would probably have sufficed and come across much better from a PR perspective.

I hope this serves as a warning to others regarding exactly what kind of company Docker Inc is.

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I am guessing the lawyer doesn't expect a lot of people to fight this (since few have the money to burn) but realistically the use of the Docker logo is likely nominative fair use[0].

> by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own.

Since the Docker logo is being used to describe or in reference to Docker, it is likely a nominative defense could work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that FA designed their own "take" on the docker icon, which is different than the one docker uses. Your rights to manipulate someone else's trademarked logo are much more limited.

you might be right, but there is a lot of creativity out there surrounding logo manipulation. i've seen many variations of twitter, facebook, etc; to fit a given design.

IANAL, but if i was running a company and people were using their own takes on my logo to reference my product, I would be flattered more than anything. If they were using it as their own, I would certainly have a problem with that. I was under the impression that it was the latter that companies would need to go after in trademark abuse. Going after the former feels... needlessly abrassive, and can turn off formerly hard-won, die-hard users.

All those companies have very strict branding guidelines actually. I ran into this when designing a site for a corporate customer, we had to follow all the branding/logo guidelines in the little social "connect to us" section. https://about.twitter.com/company/brand-assets https://www.facebookbrand.com/dos-donts https://brand.linkedin.com/policies https://developers.google.com/+/branding-guidelines?hl=en etc.

Also, open source groups protect their logos just as strongly. E.g. https://www.djangoproject.com/community/logos/

But that's a copyright issue, not a trademark issue, and the lawyer specifically referenced trademark usage. So while that might apply in the broader sense, that isn't what they raised.

Yes and no. If they had to sue, it would primarily be under copyright law. The impetus for all this though, is fear of weakening a distinctive trademark.

And yeah, they would have grounds under dilution too... http://www.inta.org/INTABulletin/Pages/TrademarkDilutionRece...

Plus some states have their own laws on trademark dilution, which may be even more restrictive.

EDIT: Replying to the below--

" following list of non-exhaustive factors that courts may consider"

You would need a court to actually balance the factors.

Dilution doesn't apply. Both the original logo and the new logo are designed to recognise the same entity. It fails part V in your article:

> (v) Whether the user of the mark or trade name intended to create an association with the famous mark.

Since the users of the new mark are only utilising it to point to the original owner of the Trademark, dilution doesn't apply.

They could have agreed to license the trademark to the project instead. Not cool!!

We will probably do that (and brief our legal team to escalate any case involving open-source projects to Docker management before taking action).

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