How hard is it to goggle something before you name a conference after it.
As someone who is involved in naming things for big companies sometimes, it's actually quite hard to find a name that isn't registered as a trademark.
I don't like the idea of someone claiming all uses of a name forever. Very few companies (McDonalds, Disney, Coca-Cola) get that right over all uses of their name, and it should remain very few.
Instead, the artist crossed the line first and cost himself a claim to clean hands. He deliberately caused confusion, which is what brands are supposed to protect against.
Does not seem like he was following them.
If they have a problem with it they shouldn't have named the conference after his identity to begin with.
It's first come first serve in my book and he definitely got the domain to prove it.
Isn't it like branding/marketing 101 get the twitter handle, get the domain, etc?
additionally it was more than enough for someone to mistake that account as the conference account at a glance
http://futurestack.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Scree... from this you can see at the time he was using the FutureStack image itself (the line just below the logo is from the original, not his edit), so presumably at the time he got suspended, he was using the original FS logo
Dropbox was at getdropbox.com for a while before they were able to purchase the dropbox.com domain.
Unless you've trademarked it, which you should probably due to prevent people who are terrible at their marketing job from absconding with something you value. A trademark application is something like $275.
Also, trademark creates a legal right. Whether that creates a moral right likely depends on your take on moral philosophy.
My photo is me, by bio describes me and expressly says I'm not the musician (and gives their actual username) and yet I get mentions all the time.
That's people not understanding, not caring or not bothering but it's not really confusion about our two identities.
As this guy doesn't run a tech conference he has zero chance of defending that TM.
A guy named Joe Blogs similarly has zero chance of stopping "Joe Blogs(14)" the conference
One Rackspace would be in the industry of technology; the other in the industry of hosting conferences. The likelihood for confusion arising from the conference having technology-related subject matter is merely a factor in determining whether the conference would violate Rackspace's trademark. It's very likely that a trademark violation would be found, but it's still possible that a violation wouldn't be found.
Note also that Rackspace only trademarked "Rackspace," so "RackSpace," "Rack Space," and "Rack-Space" are separate marks a tech conference could use those without infringing upon Rackspace's trademark.
(Companies do often allow quasi-independent organizations to run quasi-associated conferences but this is usually a deliberate decision.)
Legally, technology and conferences are entirely separate industries with very different business, legal, and tax considerations. A technology company that makes software for conferences is not in the conference industry; a conference with technology subject matter is not in any of the technology industries. This may be splitting hairs, but the law is always a matter of splitting hairs.
That's pretty uncool.
> My latest strategy was to pretend to be them on twitter to get some of their followers
That's different than "pretend(ing) to be them", which are his words to describe what he did. Until that point, he had the moral high ground.