This guy completely misunderstands how intellectual property around brands and names works.
Copyright doesn't protect your brand name. Trademark does.
Trademark doesn't give you blanket protection that stops every other person on earth from using your trademarked term. What you get instead is a highly context-specific protection. A trademark protects the use of your trademarked term in a specific service/goods segment. When you see trademarks like Ford, Apple, or Google, that seem to have unbelievably wide protection for their trademarks, that seems to span across wide spans of the market, that is because their brands are very well known, and because the use of their brand by a third-party could create a confusion in the consumer as to the origin of the goods/services.
If there is no confusion in the minds of consumers as to the origin of a message/good/service, then the use of a trademarked term is not restricted.
In this case, this guy is virtually unknown. Not a single person thinks he is the one running this conference. Its clear the conference is being run by other people.
You cannot claim an absolute property right to a silly sequence of words just because you think you said it first, and because you made a domain.
Yes, the domain and the twitter handle should be yours by right of first occupation. But nothing more.
edit: changed "absolute nobody" to "virtually unknown" to address rudeness concerns.
edit: with regards to the charge of rudeness leveled against the conference organizers: In a world literally flooded by brands and names, name collision is not rudeness, it is almost inevitable.
I don't think 'nobody' is name-calling. It's accurately, if not tactfully, describing a status of fame and recognition. He is not famous at all, and regardless of what we may or may not like about chiptunes and electronica, it is a niche market for people. His response to the confusion (which admittedly is frustrating and annoying) is simply confirmation of this lack in status. How much frustrating interaction on social platforms does your average minor celebrity (internet or otherwise) deal with? How do they respond, or do they even respond at all?
We are what we are by the actions we take. Reactive actions are still actions, and they stand alone at the end of the day. If you react to negativity with more negativity, that's telling of you, not the negativity that fed that action. It's human to lash out, but it's also human to choose not to do so.
I think that's a fair point. In this context "absolute nobody" reads more like "worthless" to me, rather than just saying something like "unknown" and it seemed unnecessarily harsh.
I think in any other context, that would be insulting, but since the poster was specifically talking about how popularity affects trademarks with respect to extremely popular brands like Google, Apple, etc, it is fine. I had to re-read his message after seeing yours because my first thought was, "What insult is this person talking about?"
You're putting words in his mouth with this comment. I think he understands the legal situation just fine. He's accusing them of being "pretty fucking rude", not taking them to court.
I don't think I am. He mentioned Copyright, and he seems to think he has some sort of claim over a sequence of words, outside of his domain rights.
He may have a proprietary claim in the area he practices his arts. He has no other claims.
If he actually understood this, he would not be moaning to us today in this post, which is obviously trying to name and shame the conference.
Well, I'm not cool with this BS name and shame game, that is why I wrote my comment. And I think the comment was pretty level-headed given this guys complete lack of thought into how such accusations might play out in a court of public opinion, where people don't actually think about the consequences of automatic IP rights for "first speaking" names.
Seems a bit tenuous, to say that must mean he thinks of this as a copyright issue. It's a joke about a hypothetical presentation on 2 related but distinct topics. Maybe he's only saying "branding ethics" have been violated, not a supposed "copyright" to the name infringed.
What is he misunderstanding? There's nothing in the post mentioning copyright or suggesting the author thinks he has a legal case. He just thinks New Relic are being jerks.
Implied ownership claim is not a legal claim to copyright, and I don't see how the author alludes to it being so.
Aside from that - well, it was a pretty rude move, particularly in that they didn't bother to acknowledge him when he talked to them (albeit over twitter) before ranting about it.
I don't think there's a question that the conference can do this legally, but they're still being ass-hats by ignoring it (and getting his twitter account suspended).
Do you believe the marketing efforts that went into naming the Future Stack conference chose that name accidentally unaware of this person's domain and other online presence? If not, then I'm not sure collision is the correct word to use here.
I just don't think people have to abandon a cool name just because someone somewhere registered a domain or has a twitter handle with the same name.
Ideally you make up a new word for your new enterprise. But it ends up being harder than you think if you are trying to name something with an identifier that means something in a domain. Anyone that has to name a new product or company can attest to this.
Actually they can try to trademark the term and then make a play for the domain and twitter account. If he gets to keep the domain in the case that they have a trademark he can still be prohibited from actually using the name on the site or for email addresses (not a lawyer but I've seen this play out in court). To best thing for him to do is probably to trademark it himself which might work out a bit cheaper than contesting their trademark application. His first and ongoing use might trump their investment in the brand.
No. The same wordmark, e.g. "ACME" may have hundreds of registered owners, each for a specific business activity: perhaps a company in Florida sells ACME burgers and a company in California runs an ACME carwash. These companies do not have any claim on the domain name unless somebody is misusing their trademark by pretending to be them or trading off their name while performing the same business activity.
A registered trademark should not prevent somebody from continuing a usage which they were engaged in first, before the trademark was registered. If the business activities overlap then the registration itself should be rejected, if not it is likely to be invalid and can be challenged.
I don't believe that the business activities of is guy and the developer conference are sufficiently similar, I doubt he has any recourse, nor should he have expected any.
He doesn't need to be actively passing off. They just need to demonstrate confusion in the mind of the consumer, which he has already conveniently done for them here.
You do raise the very relevant point that tlds don't equate to trademark categories and that in a more just world domains should therefore be out of reach until the laws catch up with this.
A personal trademark has only limited protections if it is not registered. It is also not clear that he wanted trademark protections to apply, since he did not seem to use the (TM) symbol that is allowed prior to registration. He could challenge an attempt at a trademark application, but the other FutureStack might have a good case given how many people confused his account for the conference.
Copyright doesn't protect your brand name. Trademark does.
Trademark doesn't give you blanket protection that stops every other person on earth from using your trademarked term. What you get instead is a highly context-specific protection. A trademark protects the use of your trademarked term in a specific service/goods segment. When you see trademarks like Ford, Apple, or Google, that seem to have unbelievably wide protection for their trademarks, that seems to span across wide spans of the market, that is because their brands are very well known, and because the use of their brand by a third-party could create a confusion in the consumer as to the origin of the goods/services.
If there is no confusion in the minds of consumers as to the origin of a message/good/service, then the use of a trademarked term is not restricted.
In this case, this guy is virtually unknown. Not a single person thinks he is the one running this conference. Its clear the conference is being run by other people.
You cannot claim an absolute property right to a silly sequence of words just because you think you said it first, and because you made a domain.
Yes, the domain and the twitter handle should be yours by right of first occupation. But nothing more.
edit: changed "absolute nobody" to "virtually unknown" to address rudeness concerns.
edit: with regards to the charge of rudeness leveled against the conference organizers: In a world literally flooded by brands and names, name collision is not rudeness, it is almost inevitable.