this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
270 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, there isn't. You're just repeating incorrect information.
The second you change how a project works in any way in any context, it is no longer the same product and you are not entitled to use their trademark to reference it.
Functionally, any scenario where there's any room at all for brand confusion or implied endorsement is trademark infringement. But even if you buy the outrageous lie that what they were doing was somehow ambiguous, as soon as they were contacted and told that their use was unacceptable, that ambiguity goes away.
However, it's quite plausible that they did not modify the project at all. Instead, they are providing their own servers and dictate how their servers work while the WordPress source code (& binaries) themselves are isolated from any changes. That's a new service.
There's a past case where "an independent auto repair shop that specialized in repairing Volkswagen cars and mentioned that fact in their advertising was not liable for trademark infringement so long as they did not claim or imply that they had any business relationship with the Volkswagen company", which I think holds just as well here.
Think that over. If that were true, you'd have endless corporate bullying. Every past "nominative use" case has originated from a trademark holder suing a plaintiff.
(IANAL)
No, it's not. They're literally advertising the performance of their altered code.
You keep parroting nominative use and ignoring that your definition of nominative use is "as the trademark owner uses it", and that there's no legitimate reading of any of that material that doesn't very blatantly imply endorsement, which is always trademark infringement.
They're advertising the speed of their cache, which can easily be just a plugin, and the amount of servers, which well of course is external software that requires no changes to WordPress.
As for the endorsement part, I'll just copy what I said above:
See, that's why I don't like talking about the same thing in multiple threads.
A disclaimer absolutely doesn't make it not trademark infringement. It doesn't even make a dent.
Sure, a small disclaimer wouldn't, and a large, prominent, tobacco-style disclaimer wouldn't get rid of everything but will make a dent. Anything else? Where is the endorsement? Where is the modification?