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Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
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Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#32This is a great story. The world needs more of this.
Appreciate the kind words :)
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#33FYI 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…
> FYI 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's not the only option available. They can, if they find the use of the trademark to be benign (or even beneficial), offer a license to use it for this purpose.
For example, the Linux trademark has an approval and attribution process: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark
Folks should consider hiring Jack Daniels' law firm. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/jack_daniels_cease-a...
> In order to resolve this matter, because you are both a Louisville ‘neighbor’ and a fan of the brand, we simply request that you change the cover design when the book is re-printed. If you would be willing to change the design sooner than that (including on the digital version), we would be willing to contribute a reasonable amount towards the costs of doing so.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#34if 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.
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"
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#35On one hand, yes, the author was using Waffle House's own data to populate the site. But on the other, Waffle House has no way of guaranteeing that remains the case, and they don't want their private APIs to be depended upon by a 3rd party site seen by thousands of people. So I guess I'm not surprised by their reaction. Still: it would be fun if it actually was a thing.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#36FYI 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…
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Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#37FYI 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…
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Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#38It'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.
this was massive at the time and imho what the internet was made for. strike while the iron's hot, lawyer up as much as possible fr
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#39There's a world where Waffle House acquires this from him for like $50k and it's an endearing story of corporate humanity.
But if I'm running the WH brand, I simply don't want to be the semi-official corporate sponsor of every major natural disaster.
Re: Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
#40Cease 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 this, I hope.