Wow, Moz does not come out looking good here. Doz and Moz are not the same word, don't mean the same thing (I'm not even sure either word actually means anything) and are only similar in the most superficial possible way.
Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.
That said, I'm going to file an official trademark registration for our brand shortly. We've been using it for a couple of years and should be pretty safe, but just in case somebody comes along and tries to start something... A USPTO trademark application costs ~275.00 USD for one mark and one class of goods, so it's not a tremendous expense. Might as well go ahead and go for the extra protection of having a registered trademark... "better safe than sorry" right?
They actually are quite similar words, for companies which it seems are engaged in the exact same business.
I can easily imagine how someone, not familiar with either company, might hear of Moz and, later, mistakenly believe that the company they heard about was Doz (or vice versa).
Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it. So although the case that Moz and Doz are similar isn't particularly strong, it seems close enough that I'm not surprised Moz is taking this action.
While SeoMoz was promoting Marketing Analytics on this domain name there was nothing about moving all of their services to it. It seems to me that Doz has a reasonable chance (25% maybe) against the giant Moz. I would fight it! There is no way the DOZ guy could predict a domain name shift for Seomoz.com. I visit Woz.com occasionally to see what Woz is up to. I rarely search DMoz.com anymore. I would fight the Moz trademark if there is one... it is too common.
Is moz a person (Woz), a Browser?, a Metal Laminates and Architectural Products company, do they sell MOZ Luxury Wheels?, a songwriter? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Moz, finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MOZ.TO, do they sell sweaters? viva-moz.com, is it a cafe? moz-cafe, another person Middelton-Moz Institute?, does it have to do with orphans? projectmoz.com. That is just 2 pages on Google.
According to another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5800161), Sarah Bird notified Doz of the issue way back in January. So yes I think Doz could indeed predict that SEOmoz was going to become Moz.
In January their website still had "Marketing Analytics" as the featured item that was coming soon. The poor Doz guy still had no idea what was going on and thought it was different enough. Her warning wasn't very specific and he thought he was in good shape. This is really a bait and switch on him.
How is this bait and switch? The COO of SEOmoz told them that they were going to have a conflict. Now they have a conflict. It seems like it's exactly what was advertised on the packaging.
1. Capseo bought DOZ.com back in April 2011 and Capseo has been selling Online Marketing since September 2009. So it was just a matter of time that we launch DOZ.com.
2. We didn’t fill in December 2012 as you said, but March 12, 2012. (cf. USPTO)
Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words.
Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it.
"any" risk? OK, great, there is a slight, however improbable, risk that somebody could confuse "Fogbeam" and "Moz". After all, we both do something related to computers and both words do contain an "o". So maybe Moz should attack us next?
Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words.
Right, because everybody has perfect memory of everything they've heard in the past. No wait, it's actually quite the opposite. People have crappy memory, especially for things they're not already familiar with. Neither word has any meaning to an English speaker, but they sounds very similar. I can easily imagine how someone might get confused.
If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.
If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.
I don't know for sure that we would. But I'd argue that, being a longer word, you get more confusion with the one character change, since any one character changes a smaller percentage of the overall word.
The position of the character definitely matters to. For example, in your "fogdeam" case, I'd say it's iffy. But if somebody launched Dogbeam, I doubt the thought of going after them would even enter my mind. This is all, of course, assuming that they didn't also use a similar logo and similar messaging, etc.
Out of curiousity, what if they did the same thing as you, or a very similar thing? If you serve scientists with lasers (how Austin Powers of you), and they serve scientists with lasers, what would you do?
Ya know, it's hard to say without actually being in that exact situation. I won't say we would never invoke trademark law, but I will just say that - in general - I don't agree with trying to treat trademarks as overly broad.
Maybe the "Moz" / "Doz" one is a little bit more of a grey area than I see it, I don't know... I'm biased towards a certain mindset here.
That's what they asked doz to do. From the article:
> I understand why you're upset. This is not the kind of thing you want to worry about. You want to be building product and getting customers. Not disagreeing about trademark law. I'm very sorry that we're in this situation.
There's a particular irony that the Moz folks think that the Doz name is too similar to be allowed, when they're using an abbreviation for Mozilla that has been around for years and years.
Its intentional too. Rand specifically choose the name SEOMoz to benefit from the brand confusion.
From the horse's mouth (Mixergy interview):
"Andrew: What does SEOmoz mean?
Rand: When we started up, we were looking for a name that was short. That had the word SEO in there so that people would know what the blog was about. And, I was a big fan of the Mozilla Foundation, with DMoz and ChefMoz. What was the other ones that they were doing at the time? There was, like, MapMoz, there was a bunch of them at the time that were coming out. That were based around this open source, weird transparent.
[...]
So, that was SEOmoz, was taking SEO and combining it with the moz ethos. There you go."
And has been used as such by mozilla for years: it's their official vendor prefix for CSS properties their official vendor prefix for non-standard javascript APIs (either draft standards or proprietary extensions, such as Firefox OS APIs):
Heh, as someone who's only heard about Moz/SEOmoz recently, I did think that they were related to Mozilla in some way.
On the other hand, it could be trademark law that's screwed up, because I understand that there may be dilution at stake if they don't defend their trademark.
there may be dilution at stake if they don't defend their trademark
I don't buy it. Give me an example of a company that lost trademark protection because they merely allowed another company with a similar name to exist and I'll eat my hat.
I can't give an example of one being lost, but thats the same reasoning Ford used for going after Ferrari last year. Whats worse is that wasn't even a real car, the F-150 Italia was their F1 chassis. A bit silly given Ford's F-150 is a midsize truck.
Get your hat ready, there is one example: the german newspaper TAZ "die tageszeitung" used it's paw logo since 1979 but never trademarked it. It is after all a libertarian newspaper.
The outdoor clothes company Jack Wolfskin secured it's look alike logo in 1982 and successfukky forbade the TAZ to use it's logo on merchandising.
It doesn't matter, you have the responsibility to defend your trademark at every opportunity. If in the future, the court looks and sees that you didn't try to defend your trademark, even in grey or obviously incorrect cases, they could decide that it was no longer a trademark. Trademark laws suck.
Since when does "defending your trademark" means using legal bullying against people with marks somewhat similar from afar in the fog if you're legally blind?
I'm not sure I see your point. It's a two step process (IANAL): 1) fail to defend your trademark, 2) broad usage becomes popular, so you lose your mark. Sure, you may not lose your mark without (2), but you don't get to (2) without (1) and your only opportunity to stop the process of losing your mark is at (1).
So, MartinCron's claim is perhaps not invalidated by the list, since those names have the additional property of having become popular, but how does that technicality translate to whether or not SEOMoz needed to take action? Is the idea that it is OK for SEOMoz to do nothing under the assumption that Doz will never become popular?
By the way, I'm in no way siding with SEOMoz here -- I don't think it's clear that they deserved to get that mark (with the Mozilla confusion) in the first place, or that Doz is confusingly similar, but if they feel it is confusingly similar I don't see how you can argue that they can sit back and do nothing without having a risk of losing the mark.
Edit: Or, is your point perhaps that "Doz" and "Moz" are different words, so even popularization of "Doz" would not cause the "Moz" mark to be diluted?
> It's a two step process (IANAL): 1) fail to defend your trademark, 2) broad usage becomes popular, so you lose your mark. Sure, you may not lose your mark without (2), but you don't get to (2) without (1) and your only opportunity to stop the process of losing your mark is at (1).
No, that's not how marks become genericized. Marks become genericized when the consumer's mind uses the mark as a word for the category rather than as a specific product/line/company. Defending your trademark in court doesn't actually help against genericization, there's no step 1 then step 2 there's only step 2. Step 1 is irrelevant.
> Is the idea that it is OK for SEOMoz to do nothing under the assumption that Doz will never become popular?
If "doz" became genericized, Doz would lose its mark, not moz.
Marks become genericized when the consumer's mind uses the mark as a word for the category rather than as a specific product/line/company.
Wouldn't that be facilitated by consumers seeing other companies/products in the category using the same/similar name (hence my (1))? Admittedly, consumers may spontaneously expand the meaning of a word (e.g. "google" as a verb for "to search") without a competitor having encroached upon it. If Microsoft ran "Use Bing to google what you are looking for" ads and Google didn't protest, would a court really give that no weight (as an admission that Google had accepted it being generic) if Google brought a trademark case against some other party in the future?
Of course, Doz and Moz are different words, and that may be a critical point.
I don't think Kleenex got generalized because other tissue companies named themselves Fleenex and Gleenex. Or Band-aid because of Land-aid and Gland-aid. They became generalized because they were popular in their category and then any old knock-off (what ever the name) was the same to consumers.
> Wouldn't that be facilitated by consumers seeing other companies/products in the category using the same/similar name (hence my (1))?
Maybe, but I don't know of any occurrence of that.
> Admittedly, consumers may spontaneously expand the meaning of a word (e.g. "google" as a verb for "to search")
As far as I know, that's what happened every single time so far.
> If Microsoft ran "Use Bing to google what you are looking for" ads and Google didn't protest, would a court really give that no weight (as an admission that Google had accepted it being generic) if Google brought a trademark case against some other party in the future?
No but that's a very different case, that'd be Microsoft very specifically using it as a genericized mark which is a very different case than trademark dilution or confusion or whatever moz argues they're suffering from.
(and Google could actually do that to themselves by talking about googling stuff ("Escalator" was originally a mark of Otis, but the way Otis used them in their ads e.g. explaining that they offered "the latest in elevator and escalator design" made the trademark office conclude that they used it generically and scrap the mark))
Very interesting. If Moz and (D)oz are close, how about Moz and Moz(illa)? Lets start out as SEOmoz and when we become big enough, we can change our name to Moz so that Mozilla doesn't come after us when we are small. As SEOMoz has changed the name to Moz, may be Doz want to rename to SEODoz. What a racket!
Mozilla and MOZ provide pretty different products. If your in a different category, it's often not "reasonable".
It's the same with Mojang's "Scrolls" vs Bethesda's "Elder Scrolls". It's silly, but because they're both in the video game category, it was a problem. If someone sold a product named "Scrolls" that was a gummy candy that looked like a scroll, it would probably be fine.
If you're going to paint with a wide brush, "SEO Software" and "Browser Software" fall under "Software" in the same way that "Sandbox RPG Video Game" and "TCG Video Game" fall in the category of "Video Game". I feel there's not an actual likelihood of confusion in either case, but I would argue that there isn't one between Moz and Doz either.
This certainly wasn't their strategy. IIRC, SEOMoz started out as SEO consultants and evolved into a software product supporting SEO / inbound marketing.
I wonder when Moz was SEOMoz, did they go after SEODoz too? I don't know much about SEO, so I don't know similar they are. But if Moz as SEOMoz didn't pursue similar action against SEODoz, I don't believe they should be doing same as Moz with Doz.
The unfortunate situation is that due to small size of Doz, the cost of litigation will be prohibitive for Doz otherwise SEOMoz vs SEODoz will be a good point in litigation.
What disappoints me most is a companies that as a startup expect to be treated nicely by larger ones, start to behave similar to larger one when they become large themselves.
A very important snippet from the comments from Sarah Bird (COO of Moz)
> So, I did what I would want someone to do for me. In January, I called him to give him a personal heads up that we had a problem, that the brand felt too close for us. I told him we had a registered intent-to-use, and that we were planning on launching soon, just like him. I asked him to use a different brand for his future product or that we would have to cancel his mark. He explained to me that his product is different enough from ours that there wouldn’t be confusion. I urged him to talk to his lawyer and get independent advice before he launched his product.
That actually makes me more disinclined to use Moz-- this isn't a snap-retort by an overeager in-house lawyer looking to earn their fee, this is the COO claiming that "Doz" is a trademark violation because it ends on "oz". It's flat-out depressing, and giving overt hints about "Change your name or we'll sue" ahead of time doesn't make this any better.
I just feel that shifts from a "we're going to legally bully you" to "cmon, we let you know".
If someone were to get a notice saying, "Hey, we're going to drop a bomb on you in 3 months. You might want to leave." and continues to live there stubbornly, then complains a bomb got dropped on them, whose fault is it? Clearly it doesn't mean you didn't get a bomb dropped on you, but it kind of nullifies your right to complain about it.
There's a difference between "fault" and "blame" that's not easily expressed in the english language, but I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on your analogy. If someone is going to do something of questionable legality and warns you about it beforehand, does that make it "more legal"? I'll bet you think that people in high-crime areas should "just move out if they don't want to get mugged", too. But here, I have an analogy too:
I decide, say in January, that I want to change my company name from "Foobaz" to "Baz". Over the next 6 months, I go out to a bunch of startups named "Caz", "Faz", and "Jaz", and say "Hey so you might want to change your name because I'm going to change my company's name to Baz and I'm totally going to drop a legal hammer on you if you don't because I can afford it and you can't". After those 6 months are up, I change my name, and then flip around and start suing because they "didn't take my warning".
Pulling over my comments on the matter from Inbound.org. Anji mentions a partnership in his post that I wanted to put come context behind.
> When Anji reached out to us initially, they were CapSEO. At the time, I had no idea Doz existed, or that CapSEO was rebranding. As Anji and I talked, the discussion was around the functionality of CapSEO, which I saw as complementary. Later the discussion moved to their plans to rebrand to Doz, with a fuller focus on inbound marketing services (and software). This too is complementary, but not with the brand of Doz, as Sarah alluded to. There's obvious confusion and brand dilution of Moz that can come as a result, and it's our duty to protect our trademark.
I think it's important to have this context. It feel into our lap with no other option than the action we took, we didn't seek this out. We've taken every step to be transparent into why, and hope, still, that we can resolve this in a civilized manner. I've spent the past 8 years of my life doing startups, the last thing we want to do is derail a startup from their mission.
I love the outpouring of empathy in the language of responses from Moz. Too bad at the end the end you still decide to stick to your guns and assert there is "obvious confusion and brand dilution". Really?!?
Are you really supporting the idea that potential customers of Moz, who go out in search of Moz and stumble on Doz, would confuse the two? Sure, they share two out of three letters, but they don't sound the same (no risk of a misspelling leading to Doz) or look the same.
It doesn't appear at all the that Doz is trying to conflate their brand to cause confusion or imply a relationship.
My guess is a company like Doz doesn't have the resources to fight, but they should. I can't imagine a court agreeing that even a "moron in a hurry" would confuse the two.
By that logic services like Hoogle (a haskell search engine) are even more likely to cause confusion with other services in the same arena (search). Yet, Google hasn't barked.
I just can't see a scenario in which a person is told about Moz, seeks them out, stumbles upon Doz, and thinks they found what they were looking for. The services may be complementary and even overlap on occasion, but even to a user in a hurry it should be painfully obvious they are not the same thing.
I don't think hamming distance provides a solid legal footing for arguing conflation of trademarks. Their phonetic difference is pretty large. The legal standard is generally based on an idiot in a hurry and I think the differences are large enough than even the biggest moron with no patience will know they are different.
Typosquatting has a larger legal footprint in copyright cases than Hamming distance, of which I can find no references. I'm not saying that typosquatting is happening here, but I would guess that typosquatting decisions would come to bear here well before HD did.
There's obvious confusion and brand dilution of Moz that can come as a result, and it's our duty to protect our trademark
I just can't agree with this assertion. There is not a legitimate fear that you're going to lose trademark protection just because someone is using a similar (but obviously different) name. This isn't the same thing as Xerox or Kleenex turning into a general noun, this is just shameful bullying.
It's not a fear, it's a legal obligation. If we don't protect our trademark in instances like this, where we are aware of infringement, we can be legally estopped from protecting our trademark in future cases.
Are you really trying to assert that by not going after doz for having a vaguely close name in the same industry you would no longer be able to protect yourself from egregious misuse of your mark?
By not canceling doz's trademark you would be prevented from going after a hypothetical Mozz, who attempts to pass themselves off as moz by using similar branding and product offerings?
You and I, and your lawyer, all know that is complete fantasy. Yes, not going after doz may prevent you from going after similar companies who aren't really infringing your mark anyways... but you would still be fully able to litigate against companies trying to confuse your customers.
I see people cite this concern but have never actually seen any evidence. Since it sounds ridiculous, I'd like to see some decent support for such a contention. Keep in mind, we're talking about a service name that many legitimately feel is sufficiently different.
The only legal obligation here is probably that of your lawyers to cover their asses.
You should ask them what are the actual risks, and how likely they are to materialize, so that you can make an informed decision. Your lawyers' responsibility isn't to your company's total well-being, but its legal well being. They warn you of legal dangers, but do not consider the cost of protecting you from them -- costs like bad PR. That's why you should tell your lawyers: thank you for warning me, but now I need you to try and help me make a global risk-assessment, one that takes into account all sorts of fallout.
Interested to see a case where this has actually happened
Surely if this is as dangerous as people are insisting, there must be all sorts of instructive example cases. It's not like rational people would get into a fearful panic about something overblown.
I would expand on this further, but I'm already late to my Friday afternoon satanic ritual murder party. It's my turn to bring the Judas Priest tapes.
I think this blog post, and some of the facts that seem to be missing from it (as Andrew outlined above), shows that doz.com is trying to get people on their side without being entirely transparent. Which is a shame. Their argument dilutes when the moz.com people can come out with significant corrections to the facts.
That said, come on - moz.com (which you JUST changed to) and doz.com? I think you had other options than the "we're going to cancel your trademark" route.
Even more so because moz's boss is on record citing Mozilla (and DMOZ, which got it name because it originally was Directory.MOZilla.org) as source of the MOZ part of the original SEOmoz. Part which is now the only thing left: http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean
What a strange thing to lie about. Btw, how long after Capseo's purchase of doz.com did SEOmoz file the intent-to-use on MOZ? It's more of a moral question than a legal one.
I find myself playing devil's advocate against all the hate being slung at SEOMoz in these comments. Coming at this dispute from an impartial viewpoint (never heard of either of these companies before this story), it sounds like it could potentially be a valid case of trademark protection. The two companies sound like they're in a similar industry, and the names are undeniably similar.
I'm not that familiar with the specifics of trademark law, so I don't know what the legally appropriate outcome is. But after seeing some of the comments from SEOMoz employees, I would be interested in reading a full response post explaining their side of the story.
The reality is that Moz does seem to have a case. Both companies are in the same industry, probably targeting the same clients. At the very least, it is a grey area.
If anything, Doz has a case against Moz. Up until a couple of days ago, Moz wasn't Moz, they were SEOMoz, which is really very different from Doz. now they've changed their name and they're sending C&D letters to existing companies who have similar names to what they changed to? If they didn't want to be confused with Doz, they shouldn't have changed their name to Moz.
Here's my favorite part, moz was originally probably used because SEO's favorite directory was/is the open directory project or just "dmoz" as it is known to SEO's. And, in the early days, a great SEO strategy was to volunteer to manage/moderate a category, so that it would be easier to get your own or clients' sites approved.
I'm not sure if Rand was one of those SEO people playing that game, but it's ironic that "moz" came from an open directory and is now fighting about trademarks.
Building off the history of, yes. The history of openness and transparency, not becoming an admin on DMOZ for the sake of a link from one of the strongest domains on the Internet.
but... but... your TL;DR said "Not based off DMOZ" when the actual text does, in fact, say "building off the history of organizations like DMOZ". So, at a minimum, your TL;DR misleads people who didn't read it.
I know that HN has ring detection for up votes, but how about down votes? As of this writing, this post is only 1 hr old and has 98 points (which is higher than many of the posts currently above it) and 105 comments. yet it's dropping fast. It's a bit suspicious.
I don't think there's a conflict at all, and I hope the trademark office and/or the courts get it right. If you want to protect against indirect competitors rhyming with you, please pick a name that's longer than one syllable.
In trademark law, a mark can be "Confusingly Similar." Doz differs from Moz, but it may still infringe on Moz's trademark. Because Doz has a similar spelling and operates in the same industry as Moz, it may lead a "reasonable person" to believe the trademarks are related. The court will hold that Doz infringed on Moz's trademark if a reasonable person would find the two confusingly similar.
So, let's look at other three letter words that differ in only one character and see if a reasonable person would find them to be overly similar:
fog - dog. No.
bet - get. No.
top - pop. No.
foo - moo. No.
It's easy to say "oh, they're only one letter different" but when you're talking three letter words, that one letter carries a lot of weight, IMO.
In fact, I'd argue that something like the "macrosoft" / "microsoft" example would be a better example of something that could legitimately be confusing (albeit still a stretch) than "moz" / "doz".
A reasonable person should see that by picking such a short of name they've forfeited their right to be nitpicky about pronunciation.
My name's Ben, I've very often thought someone said Ben when they actually said something else. I don't get mad at them for saying something that sounded like "Ben". If my name was Prometheus I would have people say similar things much less often.
Seomoz certainly could have chosen a more complex name.
Doz and Moz operate in the same industry and the use of Doz would most certainly trip the reasonable person standard for confusing similarity. If "Doz's" attorney had performed a 30 min trademark search with the USPTO "Doz" would have been advised to choose a different name.
I think it has to do with the fact that Moz and Doz are in the same industry. If I run Poz.com and I sell dog products (I realize the real Poz.com doesn't), I probably won't get a letter.
It's not just the similarity of the name at play here. It's also the industry and DOZ is very close. DOZ and MOZ sell inbound marketing software and they both seem to have a lean towards SEO (or grew from there).
I had a quick look at Doz and although its different there is some crossover which makes the product sound and look as good as it does.
DOZ is "Search and Social Media Marketing done by professionals" according to their website, and Moz is "Software and Community for better Marketing". IANAL but I feel like there could indeed be confusion between the two, especially considering DOZ was CapSEO before, and Moz, SEOMoz.
So now it's a matter of trademarks and specifically timeline on who was first, but the details are not provided in the post.
They should compromise and get it over with: If SEOmoz think the Doz brand is truly a problem for them, they should pay Doz a fair sum to abandon their trademark.
First use (actual use, not intent to use) in commerce matters. A lot. And it seems like Doz has that. Also, they already own their mark (they did register it, seems there's confusion on that in this thread too). I know a guy that deals in this kind of thing literally every day - and after reviewing the marks and filings at uspto he says it's a pretty long shot that Moz will get the Doz mark removed. (actually he said "no way will Doz lose their mark") So unless those first use facts aren't actual facts....well I reckon we'll all wait and see how this plays out.
Someone somewhere in this thread asked for an example of a similar situation. I can personally speak to that. Long ago and far away I worked at a software company and we developed a web based traffic analytics platform - pre webtrends even! Anyhoo we didn't register the mark for it (young!) and we were contacted by someone who was trying to get their mark (same exact product name, similar functionality - a web traffic analytics program) registered. They told us we had to stop using the name, blah blah blah because they owned the trademark. Well, they actually didn't - yet. And we had first use in commerce. So we opposed their application, it was denied, we filed ours (which they of course opposed), but we ultimately owned the mark. Solely because of first use in commerce.
I don't know every detail of this unfortunate scenario, but from what I've read here and on the blog post, it's not at all a slam dunk for Moz. And it's unfortunate that they, and the Doz folks are having to spend time, energy and money on this.
I'm all for the little guy, and I know this must suck for CapSEO/Doz. But SEOmoz seems to me to have acted above board here. I think Doz erred, and suggest they rebrand and move on.
I don't think Doz erred. They went out, probably paid 5 digits for the doz.com domain name months ago, but didn't register it as a trademark. And then seomoz goes and rebrands last week and they are caught off guard.
If moz wants the doz.com domain, they should pay for it. Why should doz just give it up over such a weak claim?
Its funny to see Moz employee defending their company. This is HN. Most people here is highly opinionated and most has made up their mind. Nothing you say can ever justify what your company did.
Just do what Opera did and take back your lawyer letter. Don't make this mess any bigger and you'd do fine. If you want, you can prove that Moz can do SEO better than Doz.
SEO is irrelevant these days though. Product is what matters
I want people to understand the why, that's why I'm here. My goal isn't to convince people to change their mind. The truth of the matter is that we were put into a difficult position, and with the information we had, this was what we viewed as our only course of action.
Disclaimer: I once paid for three months of SEOMoz
How different would this thread be if it were Google, Microsoft, Salesforce or some billion dollar company that decided to launch an Internet marketing brand at Doz.com?
SEOMoz's openness has helped dozens of startups with posts like this: http://moz.com/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-st... You can't get much nicer than that to your competitors short of giving them money. IIRC the deck included there, from over a year ago, hints at future use of the Moz brand too.
Just because they're bigger than the company behind Doz.com doesn't mean we have to jump to the conclusion that they are the bad guys here. Their lawyer even went to the unnecessary trouble of offering to help doz.com which might have meant financially given a more dignified response.
I never said that you denied it. I said that you failed to disclose it in your comment. My earlier comment was just a friendly reminder but since you went uppercase on me I'll add that you should know better because of the industry you work in.
I didn't mean to be harsh in my initial reply, and questions are a way to avoid being harsh. If you see yourself often using this HN account to talk about seomoz I suggest putting it in your HN profile, that way if you don't disclose in a future comment, the next person may just make a note. In fact I thought of doing that but didn't, partly because I was curious whether you still worked for Moz, because in most places, like your blog, it just says "Distilled".
And your comment is pretty neutral on the face of it, but if you read between the lines it's a defense of seomoz. That's why I wondered if you were connected to them, since you left the first comment it seemed that you may have received a google alert.
You are correct, I did. Thanks for the reminder, though a statement like "Why not disclose that?" is, most of the time, taken as accusatory and not friendly. But this is not the place for such debates. Let's talk about copyright legalities :-)
You need rules to guide you on the fact that when you wade into a comment thread about the company you work for, its probably best to make that fact obvious?
He doesn't work for Moz, but I do. John is a "Moz Global Associate", but doesn't get paid by Moz. I however have commented a couple times and assumed my responses were enough to display I work there. But I should have definitely stated it more clearly as well.
I wonder if there is precident with Three Letter Trademarks, where almost any variation can sound similar. (perhaps this is an argument for a longer brand name that Three letters.)
when google came, i was constantly confusing it with yahoo... because both of the companies have two 'O's in their names.
us customers are so dumb.
finally, i picked a side and chose to use google. this had nothing to do with the fact that google's product was BETTER. i was simply duped into it. goddammit!
I have decided to rename my seach engine company from SEARCHMoogel to Moogel (pronounced "moogle") and file a trademark lawsuit against Google for being too similar. I'll let you know how it goes. I think we have a winning argument, here.
Moz should quit fvcking around with lawyers and filings and trademarks and whatever legal bullshit and just focus on innovating and being better at what they do.