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Comment by jeron | Hacker News Reader

this is a bummer - scraping is one thing but this was free marketing for them. If only they put their marketing department in front of their legal department (assuming they have a marketing department)

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No guarantee that such marketing will be good, however.

"Waffle House is so reliably open that FEMA uses it to measure hurricane devastation" is a great piece of marketing.

If you're tired, hung over, or really hungry, you can always stumble into a Waffle House at any time and get something to eat. If you can't, there are bigger problems in your life (hurricane, zombies, tornadoes).

In situations like this I always think to myself "what would Reddit say?" Then I get a bit depressed.

It doesn't take much for that to become "TIL Waffle House's owners are so greedy they force their employees to work even during a natural disaster when other businesses are closed". No it's pretty obvious why Waffle House would want to stay far away from this sort of publicity and have very tight control on anything said about it, especially if that publicity looks like it comes from them or is in any way endorsed by them.

Except for the long list of stories that have detailed how they actually do this - they have special disaster teams that fly or drive in for the purpose. And where do all the power and other utility linemen eat between their triple-pay shifts in a disaster area? At Waffle House, because it’s always open.

Too late to edit, but: after a disaster, you can go to my nearest WH and watch truck after truck roll by full of utility employees staying at the hotels near it.

Don't blame the legal department. They are legally required to send a C&D in situations like that or they can lose their trademarks.

That's an oversimplification. WH could also reach out and offer to work out a deal with the site owner to license use of their trademark. That would probably entail some compensation (which could be anything from "good will" or a token cash amount, up to millions of dollars) and probably some verbiage on the page reading something along the lines of "Logos and identifiers on this page are the property of Waffle House, Inc and are used under license" or whatever.

sure but thats also work that someone doesn't have to do. and the "house" was evidentally dealing with a disaster at the time.

Yeah, but it's work that would have had a great ROI if marketing had been fully in the game, which was kinda the point.

of course i would love to live in a world where waffle house can be as off the rails whimsy as kfc, but im just pointing out why not to get your hopes too high!

After the initial legal letter they could have licensed / agreed to the usage, or taken over the running of the website. There are several ways to protect their trademark without being killjoys.

What about the Big Mac index that the Economist uses to measure purchase price parity across countries?

The economist can afford lawyers

The Economist editors don’t blog to reproduce every letter they receive from attorneys, and they don’t taunt McDonald’s on social media, and probably don’t host the website that tracks operational status of soft serve machines.

The equivalent would be a simple text list of all Waffle Houses currently closed, sourced by physically visiting each location and noting any closures. The author here used Waffle House's branding and logos, and also sourced the data by scraping their web site.

Absolutely not. Legal takes precedent over marketing or should.

I do think Legal would be worried about a site they don't own potentially being wrong about store openings and customer being upset, let alone risking travel through a storm to get there. Trademark was the easy one to get

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