Based af. Wish Waffle House was cool enough to recognize that.
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
11–20 of 218 posts
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#12What a missed opportunity on the part of Waffle House. How disappointing (and dumb)! I would have hoped that if they had the sense to send out a cease and desist (because somebody obviously knew that "the waffle house index" was in the cultural zeitgeist -- heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index ) ... that they would have the good sense to work with somebody on a we…
IHOP is good too!
If I were Waffle House, I would be thinking "hm. This is a one person project; what are the odds that it will break/go down eventually, and people will assume it was ours and get angry at us? Could write a clause about rights returning to us, get the code in escrow... but then we might wind up maintaining some random project using a stack that isn't part of our core competencies..."
And then I'd try to work something out anyhow, cause this is a cool project. But I sadly get the caution.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#13FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law.
That said, if the author had posted a tracker of Waffle House closures descriptively, without using their marks or branding, that would be fine, in the same way that google maps is fine to list which restaurants are open/closed. The key being that "google maps" is referencing the brand of google, their own trademark, and could not be confused for something authored by any of the restaurants featured on the map. Trademark is designed to avoid anyone being confused with who was the author, it's a "feels like" definition with a rubric, not a specific technical definition.
My suggestion would be to rename a site "disaster indices" and include the waffle index as one index. Even batter (yes) if you add other similar indices, like theme park closures or other.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#14What a missed opportunity on the part of Waffle House. How disappointing (and dumb)! I would have hoped that if they had the sense to send out a cease and desist (because somebody obviously knew that "the waffle house index" was in the cultural zeitgeist -- heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index ) ... that they would have the good sense to work with somebody on a we…
The issue is moreso that they exclusively control their brand, and by letting someone else - who doesn't work for them and need not listen to them - control part of that, they are indirectly loosening control of their brand and narrative. They probably do not want the additional headache of buying this product, onboarding it, managing it, etc. The easiest but unfortunate solution here, to limit risk and liability, is to shut it down.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#15At first blush, it would seem the use of the name/logo really violates something, making it look 'official'. Something referencing their name, without the logo, and a bit 'not officially affiliated with' notice might have earned a bit more cooperation from them, vs legal aggression so soon.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#16FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law. That said, if the author had posted a tracker of Waffle House closures descriptively, without using their marks or branding, that would be…
Yeah, dude copy/pasted the logo with the R and everything. What did he expect to happen?
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#17It's a shame this sort of thing leads to legal threats instead of job offers. Still, I wonder why the author didn't keep it up and just remove the branding - call it the "Waffle Home Index" or something.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#18What a missed opportunity on the part of Waffle House. How disappointing (and dumb)! I would have hoped that if they had the sense to send out a cease and desist (because somebody obviously knew that "the waffle house index" was in the cultural zeitgeist -- heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index ) ... that they would have the good sense to work with somebody on a we…
IHOP is good too! If I were Waffle House, I would be thinking "hm. This is a one person project; what are the odds that it will break/go down eventually, and people will assume it was ours and get angry at us? Could write a clause about rights returning to us, get the code in escrow... but then we might wind up maintaining some random project using a stack that isn't part of our core competencies..." And then I'd try…
It is a cool project but probably imagine they wouldn’t want the escrow idea either, right? I mean they are a restaurant chain, they don’t want to go anywhere near anything that looks at all like providing emergency notification services, right? Even as a joke…
And I mean, do they even want to lean into that reputation to hard? I’m sure they don’t want to have some managers get somebody hurt by not closing a restaurant out of a misplaced sense of pride or bravado based on the reputation (I mean, I know almost nobody would do that, but somebody might!)
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#19FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law. That said, if the author had posted a tracker of Waffle House closures descriptively, without using their marks or branding, that would be…
Yeah, dude copy/pasted the logo with the R and everything. What did he expect to happen?
the blog post made it clear he is a teenager. I don't think he thought about any of this. Hopefully he reads this thread, learns a bit more about trademarks, and tries again in a proper way.
If it's really true that there's no true Waffle House index, that would have some value for the world. Though I also suspect that there is something that exists for that (maybe part of a paid data subscription, e.g. from Bloomberg or something), since it isn't clear that the author did rigorous research for this fun side project.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#20FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law. That said, if the author had posted a tracker of Waffle House closures descriptively, without using their marks or branding, that would be…
Couldn't they just draft up a license to give them permission to use it?