Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

sparkfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#3

Post by tezza »

now that Sparc mention it... SparkFun does sound like SparcFun,

Let's hope the two parties can resolve this amicably.

Choosing a domain name/brand is so damn hard. You can think you're in the clear and years later an established company can realise or assert there's a conflict.

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#4

Post by ekpyrotic »

chaosmachine wrote: post #2

Firefox thinks sparc.org is an "attack site": http://i36.tinypic.com/f2trth.png

So does Google (http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://ww...)

"Of the 244 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-10-22.

Malicious software includes 12 trojan(s), 8 exploit(s), 6 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine."

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#5

Post by nas »

Not cool. I realize that companies feel like they have to protect their trademark, even in borderline cases. However, this seems like a boneheaded move for SPARC. People using SparkFun tend to be young techies, the kind of people who might go on to become the hardware purchasing decision makers in larger companies.

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#6

Post by thirdstation »

tezza wrote: post #3

now that Sparc mention it... SparkFun does sound like SparcFun, Let's hope the two parties can resolve this amicably. Choosing a domain name/brand is so damn hard. You can think you're in the clear and years later an established company can realise or assert there's a conflict.

Maybe we should start a grassroots campaign to insist that SPARC is pronounced "sparsee".

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#7

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Congratulations, guys; you've made it into the big time!

Seriously. Somebody remind me how hard it's supposed to be to get into law school again? Sure, you gotta protect your client's trademark, but this is ridiculous.

Reminds me of when I worked for a little hardware company and we got an order from RamBus requiring that we disclose all sales we made of devices using RAM chips because we weren't paying them royalties. Our attorney (nice having a lawyer on your Board) just crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash, "they're just on a fishing expedition. I'll wait til they get serious!" Was the last we ever heard of it.

Re: SparkFun Gets a Cease and Desist Letter

#8

Post by johnohara »

Go to http://tess2.uspto.gov/ and do a basic search on 'spark' and 'sparc'. Are they sending c & d letters to these people too?

If they're suing SparkFun it must mean they want to use it in some 'Fun With Sparc' marketing campaign. The agency that came up with the idea is now panicked because they didn't bother to do a domain search prior to the pitch and when it finally came up during last Tuesday's status meeting it was decided to send it to legal and the person 'who handles these things.'

May as well do a trademark search on 'backpedal' while we're at it.

I like SparkFun and have purchased from them. There is absolutely no confusing them with the other guys who push iron (and now databases) for a living.

Post reply on HN