I wish I could C&D that achievement system. It's a blog, not a video game...
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
181–190 of 218 posts
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#182Republishing published data isn’t stealing.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Except for the long list of stories that have detailed how they actually do this - they have special disaster teams that fly or drive in for the purpose. And where do all the power and other utility linemen eat between their triple-pay shifts in a disaster area? At Waffle House, because it’s always open.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#184if the issue was just using the trademark and likeness, why not just remove those issues of contention, and keep the site up and running under a different domain? it wasn't mentioned that they had an issue with the data scraping.
How would that work? The point of waffle house index is the association with waffle house. Without that, you have a unitless statistic unless you assume every visitor is already in the know.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is a bummer - scraping is one thing but this was free marketing for them. If only they put their marketing department in front of their legal department (assuming they have a marketing department)
Absolutely not. Legal takes precedent over marketing or should.
I do think Legal would be worried about a site they don't own potentially being wrong about store openings and customer being upset, let alone risking travel through a storm to get there. Trademark was the easy one to get
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
of course i would love to live in a world where waffle house can be as off the rails whimsy as kfc, but im just pointing out why not to get your hopes too high!
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#187It’s for blog posts like this that I love HN! Thanks for sharing this
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#188Cease and desists are the equivalent of asking firmly but nicely in the legal world. They don't hold any legal bearing or obligate you to any sort of response. They are usually hoping you get intimidated into doing what they ask. You can always call their bluff and say 'no,' although I see in comments the OP neglected to mention they also patched/fixed the technique used to get this data so it probably was more of th…
I would have handled it better, not with lawyers but with PR people.
my point is that it’s probably a PR person sending a precrafted email or letter like this and you shouldnt take it seriously for a nonprofit hobby project unless it contains a summons. they’re asking nicely before they escalate, but most companies contract out very expensive lawyers to handle these things that bill by the minute and they aren’t going to waste it on a hobby site with even mild pushback or no response. otherwise they’d just sue.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#189Cease and desists are the equivalent of asking firmly but nicely in the legal world. They don't hold any legal bearing or obligate you to any sort of response. They are usually hoping you get intimidated into doing what they ask. You can always call their bluff and say 'no,' although I see in comments the OP neglected to mention they also patched/fixed the technique used to get this data so it probably was more of th…
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. However, you should always speak to a lawyer if you get any kind of legal notice, but especially of this type. Never assume, thats how things can go sideways, even if you may initially have had standing to dispute the notice. Always talk to a lawyer before taking any action in situations like this.
anything can be a legal notice if you say it’s a legal notice. what makes a cease and desist lawyer a legal notice? a lawyer signing it? you can find lawyer services online to send these. you can use chatgpt to send a letterhead that looks convincing. It’s not “legal” by any means until it enters a court of law, which is not guaranteed and in the disinterest of both parties usually. which is why these letters are sent.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#190Earlier 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 :)
I believe scraping is generally ok - there's actual trademark law about trademarks, which is why you got a c+d about trademark usage, instead of a general 'stop what you're doing we don't like it' c+d. A good point of comparison is steam db (and other similar sites), which uses Steam public info to triangulate market info that isn't immediately apparent. https://steamdb.info/
Unfortunately Craigslist pushed a precedent that puts scraping into risky territory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.
Obviously this was a much different circumstance than a not-for-profit side project but still something to keep in mind.