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Comment by gurvinder | Hacker News Reader

You will soon get a cease and desist letter from Lawyers of Lego for using their trademark. I am telling from my experience.

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They seem to be doing fine. The oldest discussion was 11 months ago.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=lego+calendar#!/story/forever/0/le...

The difference is that was just a project to show off, but now they have a domain and what seems to be plans to market this.

I think they are just going to offer it as open source software be a use you can get the Lego yourself. The software scans the picture and translates that to calendar input.

the last line on the post says it is an experiment and not a product.

Unfortunately, open source vs. commercial has nothing to do with whether something is a trademark infringement. The countless open-source fanworks taken down by brand-owning companies are a testament to this. As long as lawyers believe that "if you don't defend your trademark with takedowns, you'll lose the ability to defend it in court," then benign derivatives will not be able to use IP without licensing it in the general case.

Can you tell us about your experience?

few years ago, I started a site which had "lego" in its name. Even though it was actually promoting Lego and not at all commercial ( no Ads no fees ). I got a cease and desist letter from Lego Group, and they demanded that I hand over the domain to them. I didn't want the trouble for a site which was not even making money for me, so I just transferred the domain to them.

FWIW, no need to be angry with them. The reason everyone with a trademark would react exactly the same way is because they have to, by law. If they don't, the court will argue that they haven't protected their trademark and they will loose it. Yes, this happens in real life.

> Yes, this happens in real life.

Do you have any examples of companies losing their trademark because of things similar to gurvinder's case?

It is still a registered trademark, but "Kleenex" has been genericized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex#Kleenex_Trademark

I do not know if that is due to their not defending the trademark or what the precise legal status is, though.

The first example that comes to my mind resulted from the Murphy Folding Bed Co. suing the Original Murphy Bed Co. because it wasn't the original. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-17/news/vw-929_1_murphy-...

Cisco nearly lost "Chromium" over the same thing.

"33. Google abandoned any trademark rights in Chromium software by failing to control the nature and quality of the open source software developed by others but at the same time permitting others to distribute the third party software under the Chromium mark".

The case was settled.

Or, you know, they could say, "Hey that trademark belongs to us, but we like what you're doing, so here's a free license to use it."

The requirement to protect your trademark doesn't in any way impede your ability to license it to whomever you wish.

(IANAL, TINLA)

Well, you can't practice "naked licensing".

Thank you very much. Perhaps I was wrong. This requirement seems to present an ongoing responsibility/burden for the trademark holder, so it makes no sense for anyone to do it.

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Naked_license

Does that mean places that explicitly allow "fan fiction" derivative works that use the trademark, are placing themselves at risk of losing ownership of that trademark?

If so, that's very disappointing, as it would seem to be suppressing the ability of authors/creators to be generous with their creations.

Interesting; even though trademark holders need to enforce their rights, some are a little friendlier to deal with than others (www.ikeahackers.net is the site I have in mind)

[0] http://www.ikeahackers.net/2014/06/big-changes-coming-to-ike...

[1] http://www.ikeahackers.net/2014/06/inter-ikea-systems-bv-cal...

All the Lego blogs just use "brick" in their name instead.

Smallworks builds a "BrickCase" that is LEGO-compatible.

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