Go easy on Raspberry Pi. Trademarks allow a legitimate company to protect their customers from scammers and other kind dodgy behaviour. If you have a popular brand like theirs you have to use external services that are setup to help you protect the brand and, guess what, mistakes happen.
A number of fan websites can end up being targeted because they might be a bit too "naughty" in the way they use the brand for SEO. RPi already apologised so it's all good :) To the ones who are asking for somebody to be fired, please calm down.. What would happen if you got fired for any honest mistake you did? For example, We (Arduino) spend an insane amount of time and energy protecting our brand (It's the only thing that it's not open source) and the amount of people who scam people by posing as us or sel counterfeit products it's just staggering.
This is spot on. I've noticed over the past 5 years a disturbing trend of "entitlement" in our startup and tech ecosystem - to everything from trademarks, to data access, to APIs, and most especially entitlement around building products and services on the back of those people's work. While this case with RPi wasn't one of those nefarious examples, the response of the community to RPi is.
The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is literally one of enabling creators, and when they went to mistakenly enforce their trademark, the community literally fell all over themselves to bite the hand that feeds them.
If you run a successful tech business, you can reasonability except hundreds of people to try to rip off your content, steal your API, demand access to your APIs, reappropriate your logos and designs, and outright steal and resell your content. The mobile app development market is notoriously subject to this trend.
I think it would be wise for those in this community to be aware that companies are daily trying to defend themselves against people that generally don't want to develop their own businesses, but ride on the coat-tails of others. The danger is a race to the bottom of dilution for the company brand and outright fraud for customers.
If Raspberry Pi or any other company does something like this, take a moment to maybe understand why they did it, and how something might have gone wrong before vilifying a company that literally contributes TONs of work to the creator community. There are many times when I wonder how participants here actually run or have built a company - this comment isn't to gatekeep, but to point out that it makes no sense for a creator community to act like this.
I think it's dishonest to call this "entitlement". From my perspective it's the inverse.
Quite a lot of us are, and have been for years, disagreeing with the concepts of trademark, patents, and legally enshrined IP.
This is nothing new. If anything the reason you see it increasing might be that over the years there have been more and more "outsiders" (not traditional US businessmen or entrepreneurs) in the startup scene than before.
Regardless of what you think of the above, as many others have pointed out, the particular way they played this (inaction for years, and then suddenly "do all of these huge changes within two weeks or we'll sue you out of business") is not easy to interpret charitably on them.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Either way, good on them for recognizing the mistake and making amends. Might not have happened without all the backlash.
Loudly disagreeing online is not much in the way of "biting the hand that feeds them" (i.e. the parent mentions calling for people to get fired, but I haven't seen much of that here, and is something I'd strongly disagree with), and to the contrary often seems to be the primary method of getting companies to fix this kind of thing. They'll fix it, it'll blow over and I doubt it'll do the Raspberry Pi Foundation much harm. Calling out bad behavior isn't entitlement.
> Trademark owners have a duty to police their mark. This applies to all types of marks – brand names, slogans, color, product shapes, or even a smell. The cost of dropping the ball on this duty can range from a bar on future enforcement of your rights against a particular company to a complete loss of all trademark rights. As a practical business reality, the value of marks that are not policed and their associated goodwill are always in danger.
The response was posted as an image containing text, so here it is in text form for screen readers or text mode only browsers.
STATEMENT FROM PHILIP COLLIGAN ON RASPBERRY PI TRADEMARKS
Yesterday we sent a letter to a member of the Raspberry Pi community as part of our efforts
to protect the Raspberry Pi trademark that was inconsistent with our values as a community
organisation. We got it wrong and we have apologised to the valued community member
who got the letter. We are undertaking a review of how we protect our trademark to make
sure that this doesn’t happen again.
The letter was sent automatically to a small number of individuals responsible for social
media accounts and websites that were identified by external legal advisers as possibly
infringing our trademarks. It should never have been sent.
It is important that we take action to protect the Raspberry Pi trademarks, not least to protect
the public from bad actors who deliberately misuse our brands to sell poor quality, rip off
products.
We want to do that in a way that doesn’t undermine the use of the Raspberry Pi brands and
trademarks by members of the fantastic Raspberry Pi community who share our educational
mission and who do so much to bring it to life everyday.
If you have a question or concern about your use of the Raspberry Pi brand or trademarks,
please get in touch with us at trademarks@raspberrypi.org.
I don't use a screen reader and it drives me mad seeing text posted as an image. To me it just helps prove that the whole idea of arbitrary character limits is incredibly stupid. Unfortunately the short content is good for getting people lots of quick dopamine hits which is great for both Twitter and all the brands and celebrities that post there.
For the most part, I actually use Lynx to read HN. So it should be relatively easy for you to see how that feels. For added spice, you can install a screen reader like Orca and activate the "virtual braille viewer". That will give you one line of text, usually 40 or 80 characters long. The screen reader will largely follow the terminal cursor. As long as you are just editing text, that is all you need. For reading things other then around the cursor, you basically have a few buttons to move the braille display "window" around on the screen.
> The letter was sent automatically to a small number of individuals responsible for social media accounts and websites that were identified by external legal advisers as possibly infringing our trademarks.
> The letter was sent automatically
(...)
> that were identified by external legal advisers
It's not even the typical "it was automatic" excuse... the only automation here seems to be just a target list, they just used the word "automatic" to leverage their PR.
The basic rule that you may not use 'Raspberry Pi' as part of your company name or in your domain name has been there since 1st April 2012 (and indeed potentially earlier, that was the earliest page in the wayback machine archive) though interestingly the 'raspberrypi-spy.co.uk' domain was registered a few days before 1st April 2012 on the 11th March 2012. I wonder if those trademark rules were visible at the time?
Doesn't really matter from a legal standpoint though in terms of how you view RPi's conduct here I think it'd be very different if the trademark rules page popped up yesterday vs available to read when the creator of raspberrypi-spy.co.uk started the website.
Though it's not a good look to happily leave them to it for so long before enforcing anything. I wonder if there was an initial informal approach that hasn't been tweeted about or if this letter was the first they heard of it?
They can say whatever they want, but the law defines trademarks, not individual companies.
Trademarks are the exclusive right to use an identifying mark pertaining to a particular trade. (Which is why your grocery story has no issues advertising apples for sale in their produce department)
FWIW, the Raspberry Pi Foundation appears to have rights to this mark as it pertains to various types of publications. ('publications' is mentioned 5 times in the US trademark registration)
I think that Raspberry Pi Foundation is correct here. I think that this is just a notice to not use Raspberry Pi in the site and transfer the domain to Raspberry Pi foundation (this is questionable).
Reason why i am saying this is that i saw this article with the title
"Introducing the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Single Board Computer"
They could have written "Review of" instead of "Introducing" .
At the end, I think that Raspberry Pi must also clarify properly the terms of usage of their assets in their website. For media usage,it is better to permit users to use some assets.
It got it right except the last paragraph. It basically told him to shut the entire site down. A raspberry pi site that isn't allowed to have "Raspberry Pi content" might as well not exist.
I'm not sure what the right reaction should be from the Foundation, but as as someone who has only seen the official website a couple of times, I wouldn't have noticed that the community website wasn't an official one.
They could and should provide a community trademark that people can use. Like the logo with a [Community] badge across it.
Imagine how different this letter would look like.
"Here is the community logo you can use and here is the license that allows you to use it. Only rule is: don't try to act like you are us. Thanks for increasing the value of the product by providing content."
That's a wonderful way of supporting people while also taking care of brand, styling recommendations etc. Kudos to Arduino!
Maybe RPi just hired some <profanity-word> lawyers that need to justify their salaries by doing same-old, before somebody in the top level wakes up and goes "maybe that's not the best way of doing things"?
Thanks for the Kudos (Arduino co-founder here). Most likely they used an external service, which uses an algorithm to decide if a TM is used in the correct way or not. So the so called <profanity-word> lawyer was misguided by the work of a software engineer... anyway.. Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil. The reality is that people make mistakes all day every day, imagine algorithms..:)
So, I hired a thug to beat you up, but the instructions I gave them were based on an algorithm, so everything's cool! See, I'm not a crappy violent offender, it was just people I hired and an algorithm.
> Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil.
I'm really not. But I can imagine that if you're a professional versed in blindly protecting IP - this is what you would do. The decision to do it in that specific way (suing infringement left and right) needs to come from the top and typically is not a decision that a lawyer would make alone. So, 3 scenarios:
1) this is an unsupervised default action of a lawyer that's just applying the law without guidance from management, because that's what they expect that they should be doing.
2) management approves of this and they're short-sighted thinking that the logo IP is more important than the community
3) management decided that they'll make a business move that requires stronger branding and purposefully want to kill the community to monopolize the support.
In case 1 and 2, we can hope that this will be corrected. I really don't like case 3, but again - I was never a very good business-person.
EDIT: Wow, so it was No.2. Glad to see the feedback loop working. But as pointed out by others on this thread - it's not that RPi should not protect themselves and their trademark - it's that they can do it in a better way than sending take-down orders.
I wonder if Raspberry Pi Spy could potentially win this if it went to court? I know years ago, a Legend of Zelda fan site won against Nintendo of America on similar grounds, as mentioned here:
Being a "fan site" is not a general defense to trademark infringement. What is relevant is whether the mark was infringed on as it pertains to the goods and services that the mark was registered for.
All other considerations aside, why not reach out in a friendly way before unleashing the lawyers? Surely this holds true for anyone interested in building a community.
Indeed. I'm not a lawyer, but clearly there are at least two routes to defending your trademark: ask people to "license" the trademark, or go to court over it. A site that clearly helps build up a brand should be a no-brainer for a free (or if the law does not allow, a £1) trademark agreement that ensures common sense things like "the site should clearly state it's unaffiliated" (which it does) or "the raspberry pi foundation should get first consideration if the site is ever sold".
I do hope Eben Upton weighs in on this, because whoever signed this off, it's a bad decision all round. Blaming trademark law is just a dishonest get-out-of-jail-free that big corporations use to justify belligerent bad-faith dealing. I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation can show that it's different. This is not a good start.
Because it's cheaper to have legal interns/contractors do this kind of work who are paid for enforcement not for PR. And to know how to handle these situations with tact and decency cost a lot more money. Also: trademark law is an opening for DDOS/spam attack: anyone can easily infringe, anyone can easily send threatening legal letter and now with social media, anyone can easily get outrage points up by posting legal letters online.
I thought by now companies should've learned to have the legal departments or external lawyers consult the marketing/PR folks (or use their own good judgement) before sending out such stuff.
Plenty of cases here in Germany as well that created quite some backlash. I still remember e.g. the case of "Held Der Steine", a fantastic guy who's the most popular Lego Youtuber in Germany, where Lego thought it would be a great idea to send him a "Cease and Desist" letter because part of his logo vaguely resembled a Lego brick. He wasn't amused and with his enormous reach (millions of people watch his videos) he made sure a lot of people learned about this greedy behavior of the Lego company.
An ultimatum to delete all content within 2 weeks, after they've not said a thing for 8 years, linked the site from their official blog, ... seems quite heavy-handed. Yes, they might have the right to do so, but it is shitty and not the only option.
Asking to transfer the domain with such short notice does feel heavy-handed for sure. But they haven't asked to delete the blog - only to remove offending references.
Removing all references to Raspberry Pi from a blog dedicated to discussing the Raspberry Pi is effectively the same as asking to delete it. What would they be left with?
I think that's a very interesting viewpoint, and probably says a lot about your background.
As a non-lawyer brit, this sound horribly harsh, we're about to sic the lawyers on you unless you stop everything immediately.
The very name Raspberry Pi Spy seems fairly clear - it is either using the raspberry pi to do something (spy) or it is spying on the raspberry pi. Either way, it screams unofficial.
This seems reasonable? Raspberry Pi is only successful because of the community around it. If you have a product that depends on community service engagement, you don’t do things that damage your community support.
This take was so wrong the raspberry pi ceo came out and apologized.
FWIW it's not true. You don't lose trademarks by letting others use them, you lose trademarks by not paying your renewal fees (or genericisation: but that's actually protected against by trademark use).
This is not legal advice; this is my personal view and in no way relates to my employment.
Also not a lawyer, but it is either literally what that boss said or very close to what he said — he may have used a different expletive, but he didn’t seem to be a fan, and I have every reason to think he was sincere.
Possibly I am too old (or old-fashioned) but the whole idea of automating the sending of a cease and desist letter (I mean, not a newsletter or similar not-relevant correspondence) is deeply flawed before and besides the wording (which is certainly not automated) and is far from being "amicable".
On the other hand, IF it has been automatically generated and sent, it cannot have any legal value, and so it essentially represents a form of (gratuitious) harassment.
While it is a good thing that Philip Colligan apologised, the essence doesn't "compute", if really the latter was sent to a small number of individuals, then it would have costed nothing to have these letters human-reviewed/checked.
- We will be taking over your business that you worked hard to build using our products and promoting our brand.
I feel that they betrayed the open source and maker community, may sound harsh, but limiting the usage of the image/brand like this is not justifiable.
"You may not: ... use the Raspberry Pi Word Mark as part of the domain name for your website"
I thought it used to be possible to register X-is-crap.com for your web site that tells the world exactly how you feel about X, even if X was a registered trade mark, provided you're using X to refer to "genuine" X. If this has changed, when did it change?
Correct: Raspberry Pi don't have the absolute right to prevent you from having websites with "raspberry-pi" in the domain name. If you treat this document as legal advice from RPi, it was not written in good faith.
If you treat it as a licensing agreement or a contract instead, it would be plausible to include clauses like this. "You may do A, B and C, but you may not do D" = "by entering into this agreement you acquire the rights to do A, B and C in return for foregoing the right to do D". That would be perfectly fine.
I don't see anything in the document that grants you rights you didn't already have (to use RPi's IP only in accordance with fair use). Additionally, it describes itself as "guidelines" and never as a contract or an agreement. So, bad faith it is.
Here's a substantial review of the treatment of "gripe sites" in US law [0]. In general, the legal situation has been that if your site is non-commercial, then your use of the trademark, including in a domain name, is protected free speech.
"unmonetized" doesn't actually make a difference in trademark law. If they felt they had to defend the mark under the letter of the law in order to keep control of the mark, then they need to defend it where used for non-monetary gain (or no gain at all) as much as where it is used for that purpose.
Of course sometimes mark holders will avoid going after the bigger fish where possible, just in case, unless they have a very strong case (obvious deliberate misuse of the mark).
WRT needing to defend the mark: I was discussing what they seem to think is true, not necessarily that it was actually true, and that they are applying their interpretation fairly.
And legally required or not, publicly acting to defend the mark may put off others using something similar which is presumably the desire. A bit of a bully-boy tactic perhaps, but again I'm stating the fact rather than judging it.
That is correct, trademark law is only concerned about the mark the traders themselves use. You can trademark a bunch of stuff, do nothing with it, and sue the pants of anyone who comes near it if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_troll
You have to use a mark for trade (in UK, EU, at least) to maintain a trademark. So, you can trademark a bunch of stuff but a challenger can point out you didn't use the mark and you can lose it - abandonment. A trademark isn't a trade mark unless you're using it for 'trade'!
Not legal advice. Personal opinion, in no way relates to my employment.
Could they not license the use of the name, under a contract that imposes certain conditions to avoid confusion, for a small price (say 1p), and not have to worry about losing either the trademark or valued members of the community?
Perhaps there would be significant administrative and legal costs involved, due diligence regarding where the mark is used and so forth, that they've determined is significantly more than that of just defending the mark directly this way to avoid dilution to the point of loss of control?
Caveat: I'm no copyright expert or otherwise legally experienced, other groups do things differently so perhaps there would be a way.
And? They have every right to protect their trademarks and intellectual property do this.
To prevent this cease and desist from happening, either send written permission to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to use the logo or the Raspberry Pi Foundation should provide 'Allowed uses' or 'Community uses' of the logo / trademark that don't require their permission.
This is all up to them to approve of course and if they have forgotten about this and try this again, just show them the permission for their approval. However, they can also revoke it at any time...
"Protecting" your trademark from your own community, that your charity is otherwise sooo proud of, is a bad look, regardless of legality. As they've now found out. Always find it curious how willingly people defend organizations being assholes just because they legally might be allowed to.
I take it you didn't actually look at the Twitter thread, because the CEO of the Foundation abruptly apologized for the letter, saying it was automatically generated and sent in error, and went against the spirit of their community engagement guidelines.
Now, whether you believe that or think it's just damage control is another discussion, but clearly the Foundation is balancing the relationship they have with their community against actual trademark infringement attempts, and your take is a bit off the mark.
Based on my reading of things, it looks like they are looking to protect their brand by not allowing another brand to use their name. For instance, you would be surprised to see "Kleenex Captain" or "Facebook Freedom" being the name of another business entity, and think it was okay.
What they are okay with is utilizing their name in the titles of articles/posts/blogs/etc. And with that, I'm perfectly okay.
Is this real? Is there evidence that the letter really was sent by authorized persons representing the foundation? If it was only sent by email, it has no legal relevance anyway. I would ignore such a letter even if it was really genuine and sent by registered letter, because the request is obviously nonsensical and would hardly stand up in court.
On similar posts, people have pointed out that this is something trademark holders essentially _has_ to do in order to protect their trade mark. If there's a history of trademark infringements and you haven't gone after them, apparently your trademark rights gets weakened somehow?
If this comes to a court case then that would probably be the defence. It would also lead to the RPi Foundation practically losing their trademark, of course, because letting one company use the trade mark without permission makes the entire trademark unenforceable.
It might also be argued that the RPi Foundation wasn't aware of these websites and that they took action as soon as they learned about this, which they are basically obligated to do. I've certainly never heard about them and I doubt people at the RPi Foundation do a lot of searching for other RPi communities when they have their own to manage.
If you are trading on your registered mark you don't lose it unless it's genericised or you stop paying the renewal fees (even then you have some protections).
Not legal advice. Personal opinion in no way related to my employment.
Isn't this an unfortunate aspect of trademark law? As the owner if it is shown that you do not make an effort to go after unauthorized use than a more unscrupulous trademark thief could then steal your trademark and win in court?
In general, companies can just enforce it as they see fit, but nothing forces them to do so.
Quotes from the article:
> That matters because Canonical’s actions reflect a much bigger problem: a pervasive and unfounded belief that if you don’t police every unauthorized use of a trademark you are in danger of losing it.
> The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited.
It could be argued that "Raspberry Pi" might be more at risk of a genericide than "Ubuntu", but we are still far from it, and I am not even sure enforcing their copyright would help in that case.
While that's true in general, in this specific case the website has a store (= set of links) for you to buy Raspberry Pi. They have linked to authorised distributors, but also sell their own BerryClip products as well. I do think there is an obvious risk that a visitor would be confused about whether they are Raspberry Pi themselves or not.
Yes, maybe. That enforcement policy is at least consistent with their guidelines, at outlined in the e-mail their received, so it shouldn't come as a surprise:
Though these rules are a bit wordy and sound legalese rather than guidelines.
It might have been easier if the Pi foundation was named differently, but I understand their position, though IMO a disclaimer that this is an unofficial website (as if the -spy didn't give it away) should be enough.
That’s an oft repeated myth, but it’s not quite true.
From an article by the EFF:
> The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide […] is very rare […]. Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.
AFAIK, corrections more than welcome, there is no legal basis for this idea that you can lose a trademark by not challenging an infringer. You can certainly lose damages: you can't wait until someone built a £million business and then say 'oops, now we take your money'.
If it were true then after 8 years RaspberryPi would have lost their mark, surely.
Not legal advice. Personal comment in no way relating to my employment.
Why would anyone transfer the domain? I would gladly shut down or change the name of the website. I would also want to redirect my old users to the new url.
Why would anyone ever just transfer the domain over immediately?
These letters come across as the company being a jerk, but in most jurisdictions one has to aggressively defend your trademark or you can lose it by others showing its in common use without objection. If it’s a legit purpose and not some scam site then often they can just work out some sort of “license” to use the name so all can live happily ever after. Taken out of context these letters can paint a different picture (not saying that is or is not what is happening here but more generally what often happens).
Informational use is a thing. Though, we explicitly lack this here in Turkey that you cannot even tell the competitor's brand in ads or use any unpaid brands in broadcasting.
