121–130 of 252 posts
This story has some parody feeling to it :) Just to recap: 1) Receives a take down notice for trademark violation 2) Changes name from "Cleaner Facebook" TO "Cleaner — for Facebook" :) 3) Gets surprised as taken down again Let me suggest a few names _without_ Facebook in the title: - Social facelift - Clean UI - Fresh look for social media
(I'm the original author)
What you are doing not only violated Facebook's trademark (good luck calling it fair use), but it's also against Facebook's ToS. They have actively gone after extension authors who alter the Facebook experience and even deactivated their accounts. Rightly or wrongly, when you sign up to a service you are bound by the conditions they set out. In this case, making an extension to block advertising is probably not going…
Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement, it has nothing to do with trademark infringement. The relevant test here would probably be substantial likelihood of confusion.
I don't personally find it confusing, but I'm probably not an average person. I think "Facebook('s) X" is the much more common formulation for branded apps, and it's very common to call something "Cleaner/Dark/Accessible " to indicate that your extension is a skin of that site. I'd say it's a borderline case, to be charitable, and changing it to "Cleaner - for Facebook", while more confusing about what it does, it's almost certainly safe.
But the point of the article seems to be that there is no feedback on how to resolve this from Google's side, so it's not like the author can go to court over this to adjudicate the dispute, you just get a chilling effect where Facebook et al can (ab)use to stymie people doing things they don't like.
You use "Facebook" in the name of your extension to lure users into installing it. Google tells you you can't use the trademark. You again use the trademark. Google gives up on your spammy ways. They seem to have done everything right here.
(I'm the author of the post).
Your extension should have gotten pulled... you are stealing from the developers who put ads on their products. Ad blockers are evil. You as a developer should understand this
This story has some parody feeling to it :) Just to recap: 1) Receives a take down notice for trademark violation 2) Changes name from "Cleaner Facebook" TO "Cleaner — for Facebook" :) 3) Gets surprised as taken down again Let me suggest a few names _without_ Facebook in the title: - Social facelift - Clean UI - Fresh look for social media
If I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I can't fix it. This is not about TM infringement, but the total lack of communication by Google.
It seems recently like anything inbound to Google goes into /dev/null! A number of us have been trying to get a response regarding Google Apps accounts with Play Music, and we're paying customers. There's no response to the forum https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?utm_medium=email&u... nor when I put it on Twitter and when a load of us tried direct feedback via the app, that still hasn't got any response. Clea…
anecdotally, you can get good support if you're a customer, but there's a big difference between a customer and a user. I've heard (not confirmed personally, just overheard at conferences), that if you spend enough on adwords to register on their radar as a customer, things are easy to get sorted even if they're nowhere adwords related. the big difference is that for the most part, google users/developers/... are not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can pay less then 10€ a month to get ad free YouTube and Music. Best money I spend every month.
Great. Now they should offer the same for the search engine.
Also you could just use an add block
> After 3 months of trying everything I could think of, I give up. Frankly, it would have taken just one thing - remove references to Facebook. I know that's basically amounting to doing some linguistic gymnastics in order to express what your extension does, but you _did_ in fact use a trademark without their consent, and ostensibly in a way that reduces their revenue stream. This really isn't a Graffino v Google is…
I was never told what to do or how to change it so that my users would still recognize it. Also changing its name in "Cleaner - For Facebook" was suggested (and accepted) for the Safari extension by the Safari Gallery Team.
If I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I can't fix it. This is not about TM infringement, but the total lack of communication by Google.
Thing is that they basically told me I can't do anything if the original complainant gives his go-ahead ... after 3 months of canned responses.
I agree with your second point.
(I'm the author of the post).
All these people make ad-destroying apps and extensions and then act flabbergasted when big companies relying on ad-revenue don't like that and file complaints to get them taken down.