$160M VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project

48 marcjschmidt 6 8/13/2025, 1:02:11 AM old.reddit.com ↗

Comments (6)

rendaw · 14h ago
I'm not sure why that links a subthread, this is the top level: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1mopzhz/16...

It's kind of frustrating how many people there are like "hire a lawyer" and OP is like "I did hire a lawyer".

It is weird that there'd be a minimum use requirement. What about for not yet publicly released projects? Or really, why would trademarking be essentially reserved for bigger companies?

itsalotoffun · 12h ago
Legal paperwork is a fig leaf proxy for a game played with lawyers and lots of money. If you can't actively and substaintially flex both, you'll discover how the world actually works in due course.

No comments yet

isbvhodnvemrwvn · 11h ago
Isn't trademark pretty much customer protection so that you are not mislead by people selling different things under the same name?

If the project is unreleased or small, why would it be protected in scope of the entire european union?

progbits · 12h ago
Since they are not named (and shamed) in the title, it's "Deepki": http://deepki.com/

Threads like this should show up when people search for them.

moi2388 · 2h ago
Laws never work in your favour. Never.
fractallyte · 10h ago
You don't necessarily need an expensive lawyer to take on a contesting party.

Some years back, I challenged a property developer over a right of way issue. I had no legal experience, so I went to my local university's law library in the afternoons when it was open to the public, and I read up on land law.

I bought some "...For Dummies"-style books, wrote my own pleadings, and submitted all the documents to court using the correct civil procedure rules. (Heck, I even formatted the documents using WordPerfect!)

The result was that I spent a few hundred € while the enemy was out of pocket by tens of thousands. (It ended up being settled out of court, in my favor; I'm sure if it had ended up in front of a judge, I would have won.)

Nowadays we have LLMs which can do a huge amount of drudge work for us. (Yes, with the usual caveats: check everything carefully!)

Law is understandable once you ease yourself into the ecosystem. It is possible to fight and win.