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How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

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Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#91

Post by pseudonym »

nathas wrote: post #60
pseudonym wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually makes me more disinclined to use Moz-- this isn't a snap-retort by an overeager in-house lawyer looking to earn their fee, this is the COO claiming that "Doz" is a trademark violation because it ends on "oz". It's flat-out depressing, and giving overt hints about "Change your name or we'll sue" ahead of time doesn't make this any better.

I just feel that shifts from a "we're going to legally bully you" to "cmon, we let you know". If someone were to get a notice saying, "Hey, we're going to drop a bomb on you in 3 months. You might want to leave." and continues to live there stubbornly, then complains a bomb got dropped on them, whose fault is it? Clearly it doesn't mean you didn't get a bomb dropped on you, but it kind of nullifies your right to comp…

There's a difference between "fault" and "blame" that's not easily expressed in the english language, but I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on your analogy. If someone is going to do something of questionable legality and warns you about it beforehand, does that make it "more legal"? I'll bet you think that people in high-crime areas should "just move out if they don't want to get mugged", too. But here, I have an analogy too:

I decide, say in January, that I want to change my company name from "Foobaz" to "Baz". Over the next 6 months, I go out to a bunch of startups named "Caz", "Faz", and "Jaz", and say "Hey so you might want to change your name because I'm going to change my company's name to Baz and I'm totally going to drop a legal hammer on you if you don't because I can afford it and you can't". After those 6 months are up, I change my name, and then flip around and start suing because they "didn't take my warning".

The logic here is questionable at best.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#92

Post by jack-r-abbit »

dohertyjf wrote: post #76
masklinn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tl;DR not based off DMOZ Uh? > We're building off the history of organizations like DMOZ, Mozilla, Chefmoz, etc

Building off the history of, yes. The history of openness and transparency, not becoming an admin on DMOZ for the sake of a link from one of the strongest domains on the Internet.

but... but... your TL;DR said "Not based off DMOZ" when the actual text does, in fact, say "building off the history of organizations like DMOZ". So, at a minimum, your TL;DR misleads people who didn't read it.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#93

Post by mindcrime »

eridius wrote: post #75
mindcrime wrote: post #16

Wow, Moz does not come out looking good here. Doz and Moz are not the same word, don't mean the same thing (I'm not even sure either word actually means anything ) and are only similar in the most superficial possible way. Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.

They actually are quite similar words, for companies which it seems are engaged in the exact same business. I can easily imagine how someone, not familiar with either company, might hear of Moz and, later, mistakenly believe that the company they heard about was Doz (or vice versa). Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement,…

They actually are quite similar words

Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words.

Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it.

"any" risk? OK, great, there is a slight, however improbable, risk that somebody could confuse "Fogbeam" and "Moz". After all, we both do something related to computers and both words do contain an "o". So maybe Moz should attack us next?

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#94

Post by notatoad »

macspoofing wrote: post #61
gklitt wrote: post #41

I find myself playing devil's advocate against all the hate being slung at SEOMoz in these comments. Coming at this dispute from an impartial viewpoint (never heard of either of these companies before this story), it sounds like it could potentially be a valid case of trademark protection. The two companies sound like they're in a similar industry, and the names are undeniably similar. I'm not that familiar with the…

The reality is that Moz does seem to have a case. Both companies are in the same industry, probably targeting the same clients. At the very least, it is a grey area.

If anything, Doz has a case against Moz. Up until a couple of days ago, Moz wasn't Moz, they were SEOMoz, which is really very different from Doz. now they've changed their name and they're sending C&D letters to existing companies who have similar names to what they changed to? If they didn't want to be confused with Doz, they shouldn't have changed their name to Moz.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#95

Post by mindcrime »

masklinn wrote: post #71
Afforess wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, you have the responsibility to defend your trademark at every opportunity. If in the future, the court looks and sees that you didn't try to defend your trademark, even in grey or obviously incorrect cases, they could decide that it was no longer a trademark. Trademark laws suck.

Since when does "defending your trademark" means using legal bullying against people with marks somewhat similar from afar in the fog if you're legally blind?

I object to your use of the word "fog" above. That is confusingly similar to our trademarked term "Fogbeam". Expect to hear from our attorneys soon.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#96

Post by eridius »

rhizome wrote: post #51
aetimmes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you really supporting the idea that potential customers of Moz, who go out in search of Moz and stumble on Doz, would confuse the two? With a Hamming distance of one between the names, why wouldn't this be plausible?

I don't know the statistical term for it, but the letters are on opposite sides of a QWERTY keyboard.

Which would matter if we were talking about likelihood of typos, but we're not.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#97

Post by masklinn »

rooshdi wrote: post #17
andrewdumont wrote: post #8

Pulling over my comments on the matter from Inbound.org. Anji mentions a partnership in his post that I wanted to put come context behind. > When Anji reached out to us initially, they were CapSEO. At the time, I had no idea Doz existed, or that CapSEO was rebranding. As Anji and I talked, the discussion was around the functionality of CapSEO, which I saw as complementary. Later the discussion moved to their plans to…

Mozilla could give the same obvious confusion and brand dilution argument you're making for Moz, but they're not.

Even more so because moz's boss is on record citing Mozilla (and DMOZ, which got it name because it originally was Directory.MOZilla.org) as source of the MOZ part of the original SEOmoz. Part which is now the only thing left: http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#99

Post by djim »

Sujan wrote: post #25

Slightly off topic, but does it feel 'fishy' and 'unfair' to anyone else that this was published 2 days after the rebranding was announced?

i don't think this is off-topic. this was this first thing that popped into my mind as i read this article. Moz is in the wrong here, legal or not.

Re: How SEOMoz sent us a takedown notice.

#100

Post by rajahafify »

eridius wrote: post #87
rajahafify wrote: post #67

Its funny to see Moz employee defending their company. This is HN. Most people here is highly opinionated and most has made up their mind. Nothing you say can ever justify what your company did. Just do what Opera did and take back your lawyer letter. Don't make this mess any bigger and you'd do fine. If you want, you can prove that Moz can do SEO better than Doz. SEO is irrelevant these days though. Product is what…

It's funny that you're talking as if all of HN thinks Moz is in the wrong here. There's plenty of comments on this story that suggest otherwise.

I never did.
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