Comment by examancer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by examancer | Hacker News Reader

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I love the outpouring of empathy in the language of responses from Moz. Too bad at the end the end you still decide to stick to your guns and assert there is "obvious confusion and brand dilution". Really?!?

Are you really supporting the idea that potential customers of Moz, who go out in search of Moz and stumble on Doz, would confuse the two? Sure, they share two out of three letters, but they don't sound the same (no risk of a misspelling leading to Doz) or look the same.

It doesn't appear at all the that Doz is trying to conflate their brand to cause confusion or imply a relationship.

My guess is a company like Doz doesn't have the resources to fight, but they should. I can't imagine a court agreeing that even a "moron in a hurry" would confuse the two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry

>Are you really supporting the idea that potential customers of Moz, who go out in search of Moz and stumble on Doz, would confuse the two?

With a Hamming distance of one between the names, why wouldn't this be plausible?

I don't know the statistical term for it, but the letters are on opposite sides of a QWERTY keyboard.

Which would matter if we were talking about likelihood of typos, but we're not.

Typosquatting has a larger legal footprint in copyright cases than Hamming distance, of which I can find no references. I'm not saying that typosquatting is happening here, but I would guess that typosquatting decisions would come to bear here well before HD did.

By that logic services like Hoogle (a haskell search engine) are even more likely to cause confusion with other services in the same arena (search). Yet, Google hasn't barked.

I just can't see a scenario in which a person is told about Moz, seeks them out, stumbles upon Doz, and thinks they found what they were looking for. The services may be complementary and even overlap on occasion, but even to a user in a hurry it should be painfully obvious they are not the same thing.

I don't think hamming distance provides a solid legal footing for arguing conflation of trademarks. Their phonetic difference is pretty large. The legal standard is generally based on an idiot in a hurry and I think the differences are large enough than even the biggest moron with no patience will know they are different.

I didn't know "a moron in a hurry" was an actual legal concept. Very interesting.

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