He said he began to impersonate them to try to gain some of their followers... That got him suspended.

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.

Impersonating the other FS also confused his story. I saw the logo on his tweets was the logo at futurestack.io, I thought that he made the logo first, and then futurestack.io copied it. And that would have crossed a serious line.

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.

Even McDonald's doesn't "get that right over all uses of their name" - there are plenty of shops in Scotland called McDonalds. (In particular, there is a Hallmark-like shop in Glasgow that has the same name as, and is on the same street as, a McDonalds hamburgers).

In Scotland, I can see that being a difficult case for McDonald's to win. But then in the U.S., they win a case against a guy trying to market "MacDimSum", as they claim consumers would be confused that its a McDonald's product. They won that case, so food products cannot have the prefix Mc or Mac. Trademark can sometimes grant vast powers to famous brands.

Macsween and McVities are both major food brands.

He admitted he was trying to impersonate them on Twitter. Thats the type of move that will get anyone suspended.

Doesn't seem to have gotten this popular account suspended:

https://twitter.com/untitledairlane

There are plenty of parody accounts out there. Impersonating someone is different.

Twitter actually has specific rules for parody accounts: https://support.twitter.com/articles/106373-parody-commentar...

Does not seem like he was following them.

He started changing his account to look like theirs. So as far as the Twitter rep knew, he was infringing.

Parody is not really impersonation and Future Snack =/= Future Stack =/= Future Shack etc.

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?

I used the name "Unreal" as an internet handle before the game Unreal came out. First come, first serve - I guess I should have gone after them.

fair use (parody relevance) only comes into play if it starts getting treated as a legal thing

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

I think that's definitely his mock logo, not the original. The original logo is anti-aliased and thin, not in that blocky 8-bit style. You can also see the squared-off "NeoFossil" logo above, not the rounded New Relic logo. I think he probably cut it out of a different mock splash page he made that had a line starting with "changing..."

> Isn't it like branding/marketing 101 get the twitter handle, get the domain, etc?

Dropbox was at getdropbox.com for a while before they were able to purchase the dropbox.com domain.

Maybe they skipped Google. After all, there is already a better search engine[0] when looking for existing names of brands.

[0] http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/

I just tried to goggle something. Didn't work. So, makes sense.