Mock up some convincing letterhead, throw this on decent paper, and frame it. No one will ever know better and “Waffle House threatened to sue me” is a story you can tell until the grave.
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
171–180 of 218 posts
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#172I put up a (much less interesting and more nerdily annoyed) site that described how Dannon / Danone was using made-up sciency names for the bacteria in their yoghurt, and their legal department got in touch. I didn't back down: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/legal-action-against-this... I think this example would have been fine if the Waffle House branding had been removed. Then just put a big disclaimer at the t…
Your website seems to be an aggregator of surface-level news blurbs from the mainstream media and some interviews with individual physicians. There are claims about "made-up" names and "correct scientific names". Putting health claims aside, there are no citations to any legislation that may have prevented a manufacturer from writing these names on a label. This website has a UK perspective, but I was trying to recall if any FDA or FTC regulations would prohibit the coining of new names for ingredients, particularly organisms. I think not.
In biological taxonomy, new names are coined all the time. Aliases for species are quite common. Common names for species are also common. We just learned that a "Buzzard" in the US is different than "Buzzards" in Europe/UK.
Pharmaceutical companies and scientists coin new "fake Latin-sounding" names all the time. So do astronomers! If there can be an asteroid named "25924 Douglasadams" then why can't Activia add a brand-name alias to something they use? Arguably, bacteria replicate so fast that Danone could have a new species if they cultivated it in a lab, rather than in animals.
Conversely, the food industry has taken names such as "milk" and "water", and expanded their definitions far beyond what common people recognize as those substances. Always receiving legal assent to sell fruit juice [nuts are fruits] with a mammalian name.
I've not had much experience with supplements, but more than a few I've purchased made proprietary blends of substances, and named that blend. Totally FDA-compliant.
I think your website got left up because it's fundamentally not a threat to any such practice in labelling.
I hereby address the candida albicans growing in my intestines, to announce that I dub thee candida hackernewsensis because sitting here has undoubtedly helped it grow.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#173I put up a (much less interesting and more nerdily annoyed) site that described how Dannon / Danone was using made-up sciency names for the bacteria in their yoghurt, and their legal department got in touch. I didn't back down: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/legal-action-against-this... I think this example would have been fine if the Waffle House branding had been removed. Then just put a big disclaimer at the t…
If McBroken.com can stay up...
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#174An old acquaintance of mine got a cease and desist from Jim Henson Company over his DJ moniker Mupperfucker. I know trademark holders are required to defend them, so I get it, but also...
https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-disney-is-the-proud-owner-of-m...
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing some nuance in your understanding of trademarks with all due respect. The core use of trademark protection isn't a commercial use, necessarily. Rather, it's the act of infringing on the trademark holder's commercial use. So, if Waffle House is selling Waffle House t-shirts, and a business next door is giving away free Waffle House t-shirts that they printed - then yes, Waffle House would very l…
To make it clear: The trademark is the combination of the sign (e.g. the word or logo) and the goods and services it is registered for. If you use the same sign for different goods and services then there is no infringement and no watering down/dilution, thus nothing to defend against. There is a difference when treating well-known trademarks (say Coca-Cola, Sony, Google), however I doubt Waffle House gets over the t…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waffle_House_Logo.sv...
This logo image consists only of simple geometric shapes or text. It does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain. Although it is free of copyright restrictions, this image may still be subject to other restrictions. See WP:PD § Fonts and typefaces or Template talk:PD-textlogo for more information.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#176"all publicity is good publicity" Apparently false (from WH perspective).
They need to review the rules of acquisition again.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
No guarantee that such marketing will be good, however.
"Waffle House is so reliably open that FEMA uses it to measure hurricane devastation" is a great piece of marketing. If you're tired, hung over, or really hungry, you can always stumble into a Waffle House at any time and get something to eat. If you can't, there are bigger problems in your life (hurricane, zombies, tornadoes).
It doesn't take much for that to become "TIL Waffle House's owners are so greedy they force their employees to work even during a natural disaster when other businesses are closed". No it's pretty obvious why Waffle House would want to stay far away from this sort of publicity and have very tight control on anything said about it, especially if that publicity looks like it comes from them or is in any way endorsed by them.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an oversimplification. WH could also reach out and offer to work out a deal with the site owner to license use of their trademark. That would probably entail some compensation (which could be anything from "good will" or a token cash amount, up to millions of dollars) and probably some verbiage on the page reading something along the lines of "Logos and identifiers on this page are the property of Waffle House…
sure but thats also work that someone doesn't have to do. and the "house" was evidentally dealing with a disaster at the time.
Yeah, but it's work that would have had a great ROI if marketing had been fully in the game, which was kinda the point.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#179Yeah, using their logo like that is obvious trademark infringement, that would be why you got a C&D for trademark reasons.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here! After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)
Probably because of you, the legal dogs hired by Waffle House probably updated their ToS to include "unauthorized scraping"
As long as you didn’t actively agree to anything, you are not held to the Terms of Service for a public website. There are restrictions on what you can do with the data, mostly around direct competition with the source (I’m not a lawyer, so DYOR). The average scraping volume from Google and AI companies would make an indie site’s scraping volume look minuscule.
Check out this wild case to see how far you can go with scraping and remain legal. It’s surprising.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/meta-drops-lawsuit-against...