And yes: it is an incredibly simple thing to avoid, and yet it is also a deceptively difficult thing to fix and cleanly walk away from later when the other party actively wants you to not exist as you are often now stuck in a really shitty position with respect to the hole you have already dug yourself into and the legal fees you are potentially going to lose just trying to defend yourself going forward. Hell: someone I don't like from the "extended" Cydia ecosystem (if nothing else: they are the kind of person who thinks they are above trademarks) once even just hinted on Twitter at building a product with the name "Snapchat" in it (which I obviously would never have sold as I was really careful about this sort of stuff) and their lawyers started coming after me with a cease and desist for something I wasn't even going to do, costing me thousands of dollars to deal with (as their lawyer knew to directly contact my lawyer, making it harder for me to avoid any costs).
saud justification seems much more important to the US government though
Why would Snapchat's lawyers go directly to your lawyers on this one? And how would that cost you legal fees. Wouldn't your lawyers need your sign-off to bill on any projects that they are to undertake?
Some call me crazy, but I always read what I'm signing before I sign, even if it's something coming from my SO to "just quickly sign", or if it's random paperwork that a teller or person just gives me while saying "sign here and here and we're all done" as if it's the most normal of things and not some super-scary contract where I could be selling my kidneys to a company.
This is exactly what happened with "Reddit is fun" which had to rebrand as "RiF" but quickly changed again to "RiF is fun for Reddit" which is a rather clunky name but seems to meet the criteria of having enough standoff to the original
that said, i was exposed to cydia back in 2008 with the original iphone and used that phone till around 2013 i guess. best time of my life. thank you for your work. the "Walled garden" that apple created was made more open because of your work. thank you again
2) Even if you don't agree with the concepts behind trademark law and you really believe that it is somehow a "trap" laid out by corporations, if you are going out of your way to go to war with a multi-billion dollar company your mental model shouldn't be "in for a penny, in for a pound" but more "choose your battles wisely": even ignoring the "you should have a lawyer" aspects of this, you should analyze each decision you make from the perspective of "can I foresee this making them extra-angry" and then decide "is this a core part of my crusade, or is this the kind of thing that is just going to make me more likely to end up failing?".
Smart play, rather end on a high note, without months and months of C&Do letters and axety and stress. Learn and move on.
"We were also asked to remove all links for the distribution of any vanced apps that led to the decision of discontinuation."
Whatever the second half of that sentence may mean in plain English, the whole article is hard to parse.
Sure, but the past is hard to change. So, when a company is threatening to take legal action based on violations you have already committed unless you take a specified set of steps, merely stopping future violations without complying with the rest of their demands is risky.
What's probably not illegal to distribute is the source code for the tools they used to generate those modified Youtube apps, so I'm a bit surprised by how adamantly they're refusing to do so in this post.
I'm guessing the C&D was followed by a "we won't sue you if you do the following" proposal, which includes not releasing the source code for their tweaks.
However as others point here the "You are using our logo without our permission" is just a valid reason to shut down an app, and happens more often that it should.
1. Trademark infringement. Easy to prove even in a court, often can get an injunction approved with no further effort.
2. Copyright infringement. Requires some effort to convince a judge that, yes, this is your content, code, or art, and that they did indeed copy and redistribute it, which would cost a few hours of legal professionals' time to draft up in layman's terms, and lead to a few dozens of pages in a court filing. Easier for visual stuff (such as images) than, say, decompiled code, especially as with decompiled code you may even 'accidentally' be violating the patched app's authors' copyright.
3. Anti-circumvention. This is a bit more of a stretch, but if someone doesn't want (or can't afford) a defense, it's easy to spin something in this way. For YT, since there's some obfuscation applied (see the YTDL takedown attempt), one could also easily argue this. Similarly, one could also argue the same if, for example, a video game modification 'works with pirated copies'.
4. 'The far stretch', such as 'runtime patches make a derivative work in memory', some antitrust violations ('their free patches are devaluing our paid subscriptions/microtransactions'), and other 'less' gray-area stuff.
5. Outright challenging the legality of specific types of reverse engineering. This one is tough as it may go the wrong way as well, and this could attract the attention of big financial sponsors (e.g. the EFF) to steer this into 'dangerous precedent'.
Now, this case is of course just referring to a C&D, but a lot of companies only send/distribute C&D letters once they also have a court filing for e.g. an injunction ready to go in parallel, for example if the C&D is explicitly refused.
Even if that's not the case, refusing it may just as well lead to a court case in a few months, based on another 'technicality' somewhere in this hierarchy.
(statement of authority: I've dealt with numerous of these cases in the video game industry, some of them being the accused myself, sometimes involving others telling me their experiences and/or asking for advice other than 'get a lawyer')
Huh?!? That was the only reason behind the C&D letter and they killed the product when a simple logo redesign could have solved the issue? Or the C&D letter would have voided any attempt to do that? Something doesn't add up.