

Ask HN: What to do? Received a Cease and desist letter - carlos

Hi,<p>I have a site, where users may create their own accounts identified by the username (as usual :)
I been receiving "cease and desist" emails from one source asking to delete one of the accounts as the username matches "lindblad" which seems to be owned by the source. I've been trying to find more info about it in some trademark databases without really finding the proof of their ownership. It would be very easy for me to just "delete" that account, but honestly I don't want to do it, at the end it's just a "username" without any intention to impersonate anybody.<p>What would you do?
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nudge
I'm not a lawyer, but I would have thought that trademarks are balanced by
common sense and context. So, if you have a shoe company called London, and I
call myself London, you have no claim against me unless I'm also selling shoes
(because it seems like I'm representing myself as you), because it's a
reasonably common word that has meaning outside of your shoe-selling context.

In your case 'Lindblad' appears to be a reasonably common surname. It just so
happens that one person with that name set up an expedition company - I'm
guessing they're the ones that wrote to you. In this case I think the company
has absolutely no claim over the name whatsoever.

So, here's what you do:

Post the letter on your site's blog. Write an article about how you don't
comply with baseless legal threats, and instead you prefer to shame companies
that attempt to terrorize individuals into giving up their legitimate use of
generic terms (in this case, a surname). Submit the article back here and to
other places that are interested in legal overreach (reddit/boingboing.net
come to mind). Send a link to your article as a response to the lawyers who
wrote to you (or write a separate response but add this to your articles).
Keep updating the article/blog with any responses they send you.

Your customers will have increased respect for you for not giving in
needlessly, and you may even get a few new users who found out about you just
from this. Plus you'll have struck a small blow against the stupid use of
legal threats by companies.

~~~
DanielStraight
Just to put some numbers on this:

There are 1.5 million search results for Lindblad on Google, and there are at
least three completely different companies using the name on the first two
pages alone, not to mention numerous individuals with the name. That anyone
could claim to own the name in a global sense is absurd.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

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jamesshamenski
I know the folks at linbblad Expeditions. drop me a line with your site and
i'll see if i can help. james of Adventurelink.com

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francoisdevlin
Get a lawyer

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newobj
You've been receiving emails from the source, or from the source's laywers?

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rubyrescue
are you in the states? if so this could be a DMCA issue vs copyright...

