> Yes, but ultimately trademarks are a consumer protection, and what matters in granting a trademark is protecting consumers from harm.

Yes, protecting consumers. And people are equally consumers of something whether they pay $1 or $0.

> but if there's a case that they need this trademark to protect consumers from harm, then that's your winning argument.

Other than the normal argument for trademark and the evidence of use they had? If you have to show a specific argument for harm, that's way too high of a bar.

> If you really are not doing commerce, trademarks are irrelevant. You can't get one, and you don't need one.

Define "commerce" here.

If we count competing in the market but your product happens to be $0 as commerce, then sure I can agree but this project passes the test.

If a price of $0 disqualifies you from "commerce" then no way, trademarks are not irrelevant and you do still need one. Consumers need to be able to find your product and avoid imitators.

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kube-system 6 days ago | parent [-]

No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else. And if you're not, then you don't qualify for a trademark because trademarks are marks that you get to use when you do trade.

I am not asking for the evidence of what that commerce is. I personally do not care nor do I make the judgment of what qualifies.

But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.

And if you're not going to do any trade, then you don't need to worry about it. Because you cannot infringe on a trademark without doing trade.

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Dylan16807 6 days ago | parent [-]

> No, you absolutely don't have to price a product in order to be engaging in commerce. But you do have to engage in exchanging goods and services with somebody else.

Okay cool, glad we're on the same page there, but then I don't understand why you even made your initial comment saying "I can understand why you're frustrated if you feel like you've lost something, but trademarks serve a purpose for facilitating commercial trade."

By your definition, they are engaged in commercial trade. And that was well-documented in the initial post.

> But, if you want a trademark, you need to show the trademark office what trade you are going to do with the mark you want them to grant you exclusive use of.

And the issue is the trademark office is not taking their evidence. They're looking at hundreds of thousands of downloads and saying "hmmmm, might be 99% non-EU, we don't care"

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marcjschmidt 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> "hmmmm, might be 99% non-EU, we don't care"

That is what fascinates me the most. The basic assumptions of everything I presented was non-EU. Somewhat annoying, but seeing it objectively, I think it was a skill issue on my lawyers side. They should have said to me "Marc, look, we need hard proof. Ask your fucking users on twitter, on github, an discord, we need a list of X users confirming they are from the EU and use this thing". I believe in good-will on the EU side, that they interpret data in a positive way in my favor - but the exact opposite happened.

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kube-system 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> And that was well-documented in the initial post.

I mean, there was some documentation. I don't know if it was well documented.

There's like 160 million reasons why the other company has better documentation.

Ultimately, the a point of holding a trademark is to give you some legal firepower. Going up against the company with $160 million, you're pretty much screwed anyway.

Their best bet in this scenario is to just use the name anyway and not piss them off. There are plenty of organizations, even very for-profit companies, that use the same name and don't have any problem with it because it's not confusing anybody or pissing anyone off.

	▲	Dylan16807 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> There's like 160 million reasons why the other company has better documentation. Better documentation of someone else's user count?