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Jon Leibowitz

@Gargron unsolicited advice but I think that you should have trademarked "Mastodon" much earlier in the game. Now you have sites using different top-level domains that all purport to be "Mastodon" and it's a huge source of confusion.

3 comments
Jon Leibowitz

@Gargron At least with a trademark you could have a bit more control over that.

Eugen Rochko

@jon Eh I dunno about that, defending a trademark is a lot of ongoing (lawyer) work, constant vigilance, if you fail to do so once you lose the trademark

Jon Leibowitz

@Gargron bringing this back up, imo you *really* should consider enforcing your ownership of your software's branding - people are spinning up instances with confusingly similar names to your own instances. example:

reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments

See if you can get someone from one of the free software associations (like @conservancy) to advise you on your rights here.

Eugen Rochko

@jon @conservancy I don’t think anything can be done. It’s not like I could buy up all similar domains. The ship has sailed in 2017 when mastodon.cloud, mastodon.network, mastodon.xyz etc have popped up.

Jon Leibowitz

@Gargron I'm not a lawyer but I don't think the ship has sailed. You still hold the rights as the creator of the project, but if you do do not assert them it would dilute your branding. It all depends on jurisdiction as well. Consulting a lawyer would be your best bet.

On the other hand, you don't want to burn your goodwill with your community either and choosing to enforce your naming rights may be seen in a bad light. You can probably get free advice from folks in the community though.

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