Hacker News Reader

A little off-topic, but it's really cool to see that you're still floating around here. One of my first "hacker" moments was Jailbreaking a used first-gen iPod I bought off Craigslist in 5th grade. I remember seeing your name on a number of things, and people always mentioned you on forums/IRC when I had questions. Never got around to saying hello, but I suppose it's better late than never to say 'thank you' for expanding my young mind and really shoving me head-first into the world of futzing with locked-down electronics!

its interesting to think of what future benefits youtube gets as a company by encouraging said hackers as possible future employees

saud justification seems much more important to the US government though

I had the exact same experience, although I was older (9th/10th grade). I'd go so far as to say I might not be a programmer if it wasn't for my experience of tweaking the hell out of my jailbroken iPod touch.

> their lawyers started coming after me with a cease and desist for something I wasn't even going to do, costing me thousands of dollars to deal with (as their lawyer knew to directly contact my lawyer, making it harder for me to avoid any costs).

Why would Snapchat's lawyers go directly to your lawyers on this one? And how would that cost you legal fees. Wouldn't your lawyers need your sign-off to bill on any projects that they are to undertake?

Snapchat's lawyers actually knew my IP lawyers from a prior issue (which wasn't actually related to Snapchat). (And it isn't even that strange, btw: there is actually a quirk of legal ethics that if, as a lawyer, you know someone else is represented by a lawyer, you aren't supposed to directly contact that person without going through their lawyer.)

What kind of retainer arrangement do you have with your IP lawyers where someone can reach out to them directly and incur billable time? I've got a couple different kinds of lawyers, and there isn't one of them you could call up and get me billed for. You might have a reasonable complaint for your lawyers about this!

They're lawyers, so this kind of setup is probably in their agreement already, and thus nothing the person could do. I'd chalk it up as a paid-for lesson and keep an eye out for it in subsequent agreements.

Some call me crazy, but I always read what I'm signing before I sign, even if it's something coming from my SO to "just quickly sign", or if it's random paperwork that a teller or person just gives me while saying "sign here and here and we're all done" as if it's the most normal of things and not some super-scary contract where I could be selling my kidneys to a company.

I do the same. Most people really don't expect it, that's how uncommon that is. When I signed a work contract at an university it was filled with legal text and obligations, mostly in regards to expected work ethics. Nothing actually insane I was opposed to, but it was about 20 pages of mostly dense legal text and excerpts from state law I wasn't sent in advance and it took me nearly 2 hours to work through. You would expect everyone to actually carefully read that! It's your work contract and literally law you have to follow! The HR lady didn't expect me to read it and apparently wasn't aware how long it takes to actually read everything, so she ended up waiting 30 minutes before she left the room and told me to tell her when I'm done xD. Later I asked her if it's uncommon and she told me I'm actually the first one to sit there and carefully read everything before signing.

That lawyer should have notified you first, then you could have passed them on to your lawyer. These arrangements are not a blanket thing, they are typically on a per-case basis. And your lawyer likely should have contacted you to get your agreement that they were going to represent you in this matter. Which likely they did only you didn't realize that that was what was happening. If my lawyer started to invoice me for a matter that I did not refer to them I would tell them to go pound sand, lawyers or not. So beware of accidentally agreeing that they could represent you if they notified you.

> And yet, somehow, you see it happen time and time again as people just can't help themselves when it comes to using other peoples' trademarks for their clients.

This is exactly what happened with "Reddit is fun" which had to rebrand as "RiF" but quickly changed again to "RiF is fun for Reddit" which is a rather clunky name but seems to meet the criteria of having enough standoff to the original

Same with RedditSync -> Sync for Reddit

Welp. Makes me wonder whether Hacker News or @dang will send a C&D for naming my browser extension "Refined Hacker News" :P. /s

You could explain in court that "Refined for Hacker News" just sounded stupid.

Maybe. YC registered "Hacker News" as a trademark a few years ago.

i would suggest you to discuss your arrangement with your lawyer (i am one and i do not do any work on behalf of the client without their approval. not even agreeing to discuss matter with a third party, let the client confirm if they want me to talk)

that said, i was exposed to cydia back in 2008 with the original iphone and used that phone till around 2013 i guess. best time of my life. thank you for your work. the "Walled garden" that apple created was made more open because of your work. thank you again

As a consumer, I'd only think of them as being Vanced, and also mostly forget their name

It took me a while to see "Advanced, without the ad(s)"

Copyright and trademark law isn't taught in most schools. Why would you expect most people to know how to avoid the traps laid out by the corporations?

1) One reason I feel it is so "obvious" is that trademark law (which I am going to isolate, as this has nothing to do with copyright law: the two are often lumped together but they are extremely different and serve a very different purpose) is more reasonably structured than people give it credit for and most of it really is designed to prevent impersonation, which by and large helps consumers and end users; and like, frankly, in most of these cases, if you ask people why they insisted on using the other person's product's name in their product it actually isn't benign: they actively want their users to confused the two products a bit.

2) Even if you don't agree with the concepts behind trademark law and you really believe that it is somehow a "trap" laid out by corporations, if you are going out of your way to go to war with a multi-billion dollar company your mental model shouldn't be "in for a penny, in for a pound" but more "choose your battles wisely": even ignoring the "you should have a lawyer" aspects of this, you should analyze each decision you make from the perspective of "can I foresee this making them extra-angry" and then decide "is this a core part of my crusade, or is this the kind of thing that is just going to make me more likely to end up failing?".

I have almost zero understanding of the details of trademark law (and I don't recall it coming up in school), but not using someone elses trademark on my own product seems pretty obvious to me.