

Openbay name clash - jontro
https://github.com/isohuntto/openbay/issues/27

======
mosburger
Yeah, I'm one of the developers at www.openbay.com (I'm not Adam, I'm one of
the other web developers).

We've spent a couple years trying to get our startup off the ground, and this
really sucks for us. And I'm a _fan_ of TPB - I've used it, and I admire their
work. This isn't a case of some big corporation trying to exercise it's legal
muscle to ward off bad PR, we're a few people running out of a co-working
space in Cambridge.

Armchair lawyers will likely chime in how this isn't a "real" name clash and
how they're different things in different lines of work (and they'd be right),
but the thing that really sucks for us is SEO. Many users (especially older
ones) have gotten in the habit of just typing "openbay" or "open bay" into
google and not the URL bar - it's actually a pretty large percentage of our
organic search hits. This happens even more if/when they hear about us in the
press. What those users get for search results right now are a bunch of news
sites about "piracy," which isn't a great thing, particularly for that
demographic.

It'd be so awesome of the project could be renamed out of the kindness of the
maintainers' hearts, but I know that's not likely. The cat's already out of
the bag now. But we figured it wouldn't hurt to ask nicely.

~~~
butwhy
Well there are already a whole bunch of articles referencing openbay and they
will remain in the search results. Not really anything you can do about it.

~~~
vertex-four
After some reasonable amount of time they'll drop off the front page of
Google, though - Google prefers new information to older information, in
general.

~~~
butwhy
Very generalised comment and not necessarily true (many factors come into it).
But that implies that this company is going to generate enough of its own
publicity to push out stories already ranking from techcrunch and arstechnica
etc.

------
eloisant
Beyond the name thing, I believe the source code for Pirate Bay is useless.

It was a crappy website, with bare-bone features, any web developer worth its
salt could build a better torrent site in a couple weeks.

The value of Pirate Bay was their user base, uploader base and their
resilience to legal threats and even a raid a few years ago. None of that has
to do with the source code that powers the site.

~~~
hackerboos
The website itself wasn't that complex. The tracking software however was, but
that's open source anyway.

[http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/](http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/)

------
unfunco
Coincidentally; I had a failed project back in 2004 that was also called
OpenBay (named after a Sharks Keep Moving song, in my case.) – I'm hoping your
dignified request is listened to, it's refreshing to see something like this
being handled politely.

------
vortico
Name clashes are extremely common and almost inevitable, and unfortunately
there's not much the first project's owner can do about it. The trademark
office would likely consider "auto sales" and "media sharing site" to be as
distant as possible, and there are multiple TLDs for a reason.

~~~
Mahn
While what you say is true, in this particular case I don't see any reason for
ISOHunt not to change the name, since as far as I can tell it's just a pet
project for them, and most people won't remember it in a month anyway.

------
ibrahimcesar
"Clash"?

~~~
teddyh
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clash#Noun](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clash#Noun)

5\. Opposition; contradiction; such as between differing or contending
interests, views, purposes etc.

a _clash_ of beliefs

a personality _clash_

