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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Just to confirm, they have a trademark: https://trademarks.justia.com/866/35/discord-86635386.html

They don’t seem to mention it on their website. I don’t see any guideline for how to respect their trademark: https://discord.com/branding

Now the question, does it risk dilution if a company doesn’t say what’s allowed.

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Yes. Trademark law says the use of a trademark as a trademark is an issue. Using the discord logo to link to a discord channel is fine. Allowing a site to be named Discord with a different TLD is using a trademark as a trademark and that can have consequences. The whole point of trademark is to distinguish goods/services and by failing to prevent the use of discord.io they kinda dropping the ball here in my opinion.

Does the fact that .io is a ccTLD (despite not actually being used primarily for internal BIOT purposes) offer any counterpoint to that argument?

No, it’s still trademark infringement. Especially since it relates to the same product. It would be different if they were unrelated but this is about as bad as infringement and brand confusion can get. Any competent legal OR marketing team would have sent them a C&D ages ago.

> Any competent legal OR marketing team would have sent them a C&D ages ago.

Interesting. That about sums up my opinion of their development team.

Using discord as a TLD would not be automatic trademark infringement. You can't just get an all-encompassing trademark for english words.

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