What we ended up doing about a potential trademark infringment

6 pointsayusaf14y ago2 comments

Hi,

I previously submitted a dilema in Ask HN regarding trademark infringement. Another company had pursued us claiming that we were infringing their trademark. Not having the means for legal fees (not a good place to waste money in an early stage business, anyway) I asked HN and got some useful advice. You can check the thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3377263

I wanted to add an update as it may be of use to others in a similar situation and perhaps some of you might have had sleepless nights wondering what we did in the end ;)

So, we changed our name to The Super Times and our logo too - http://thesupertimes.com/ The reasons for doing this were:

1. It wasn't a battle we were interested in fighting. With just 2 founders and limited resources we want to spend all our energy and time on the product at this stage.

2. We hadn't invested too much time or money on branding. After having the initial business idea we used a quick scribbly logo / identity to get going and intended to re-visit this as we got closer to launching our app.

3. We came up with something better. Although there wasn't any concrete grounds for a serious legal case (I think our names and branding were different enough) a rethink of the branding actually forced us to come up with something more relevant to our proposition.

Thanks to those who answered my query on Ask HN - it proved to be a quick and useful way to get advice.

2 comments

abdels14y ago

I think the 'We came up with something better' comment is interesting as we really didn't see that coming - but somehow everything seemed to fall into place.

(Btw I'm the other Co-Founder :) )

ayers14y ago

Thanks for posting a follow up to your dilemma and what exactly you did. I often read about interesting situations people here on hacker news are in but often lack the final result/outcome.

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