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Comment by specialdragon | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't aware of Fix My Street, thank you for that.

The reason for bringing it to HN's attention was because I too read about the service on the BBC News website and their plight with Instagram.

I was a little perplexed - it's a British company, operating entirely within the UK - why is Instagram getting involved? The 'gram' prefix has been around for quite a while [citation needed], is it an infringement of trademark? Then again, the company is posting pictures with captions, which is very Instagram-y, so I can see a certain level of cross over.

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> The 'gram' prefix has been around for quite a while [citation needed]

I lately heard about that newfangled thing called tele-gram.

(Nitpick: it's a suffix, not a prefix ;)

The nitpick is entirely fair. What's worse, is that I know the word is suffix, I just didn't use it. :(

I can see why Instagram want to defend their brand identity but hope they in turn are sued by a collective of kissograms.

The 'gram' prefix has been around for quite a while

So has "Apple", yet Apple was still sued by Apple and had to settle. A generic term may be trademarked as long as it doesn't describe the particular goods or services being sold.

Apple Computers were rightly sued by Apple (the music company, Apple Records?) as the computer company was getting in to the area of music.

The suffix -gram is already well known from "telegram" and adopted in to other 'message sharing via different media' situations: cookiegram, kissogram, etc..

The Apple case is a million miles from Littergram vs. Instagram. If they'd tried to create "Binstagram" there would be a case to answer ...

I consider the chance of actual confusion (which FWIW isn't actually the measure normally used to judge infringement) to be practically zero.

But "gram" does describe service of sending pictures.

Not really. "gram" just means "written record". Mammogram, echocardiogram, sonogram, monogram - none have anything to do with "sending" or "pictures".

There is a messaging app called Telegram and they never went after that. This smacks of bullying.

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