Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
> my experience with theory is that it includes time and effort considerations
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
>they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Moat is decades of process / tactic knowledge built by disproportionate amount of talent on geologic formations others didn't invest in. Right now they generate 15x mining graduates, university of mining tech alone enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. Then you throw all that into a mining city like Batou with 3 million people running vertically integrated operation. That's ecosystem scale with compounded advantages beyond "wanting" to put work in, it maybe scale on PRC has demonstrated ability to produce.
Between shallow kiddy pool and Mariana Trencth in terms of ease of replication, I wouldn't lean towards kiddy pool. I don't think "right way to characterize" their lead is "no moat" beyond... all the things that are actually, in fact very deep moats, as if any country can persevere their way to replicate decades of work and execute industrial policy of a 3 million large city dedicated to mining/rees.
I surmise, PRC will build out EUV (technical problem) and produce them at scale before west+co meaningfully tackles HREEs supply chain (technical and regulatory and industrial problem).
> they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Incorrect, de facto, the only firms invested heavily in the rare earth refineries technology are Chinese for the last 20-30 years. Their moats are as deep as TSMC moats so to say.
Processing is the thing china does, you don't really mine rare earths, they are in many areas. Sure there are substrates it's easier to extract from, but the massive pollution of the processing that china was willing to accept when others were not that allowed them to corner the market. It can be done more cleanly, the US has some processing for strategic reasons (not enough though), but doing it clean is _very_ expensive.
Lets hope the people modifying plants to concentrate elements make work.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
My dad still uses PageMaker to publish his print magazine. He's been using this program since 1987, starting with a Macintosh and then later moving to Windows in the late 1990s. RIP Paul Brainerd.
And why not? It was sufficient to publish real magazines as long as they weren't too long, and it costs a fraction of the cost of Quark. If you have a copy and it runs, keep using it.
That's not P/E. That's Price to Sales. P/E is price to earnings ratio. Earnings is profit. Since neither of these companies is profitable, they don't have a P/E ratio today.
I wonder how you think about trusting oj-hn as a vendor? The extension looks great.
I sympathize with the desire to release programs/code anonymously or semi-anonymously on the internet. I noticed you don't particularly tie the extension to any identity (unless I'm missing something).
Maybe extensions are more constrained than I realize. Specifically it looks like the manifest has "host_permissions: ['https://squeeze.oj-hn.com/*']," and then presumably the only leakable thing is private contact email or votes. Maybe the chrome api content of the tabs/history permissions also (seems silly for chrome not to scope that to the startUrls though?) Not 100% sure I'm understanding correctly though.
you're not wrong which is why i try to be transparent about it all on the homepage. good suggestion, i'll blurb myself, but i'm not looking for fame so i left that off. i just want the extension to speak for itself.
it is all open source and built by CI, including squeeze, which is just a few lines of a CF worker.
i'm also not anon and i have 16k karma here along with decades of history building open source that you're probably using on a daily basis without even knowing it (co-founder of java @ apache).
i also don't need money, so i won't ever sell this project to the highest bidder and i don't have plans or need to monetize it either. maybe add some ai features in the future that require you to put in your own api token. GPLv3 too, to prevent corporate takeover.
right now, it is just a ground up feature re-implementation of another popular HN extension that the author abandoned. i've done it with over 650 unit tests too, so it shouldn't be too buggy and stand the test of time.
ya, thank you, I recognize the history! The extension just seemed isolated from another identity. So I was wondering the thinking. I wish chrome let you scope the manifest/permissions on the user side more.
i've done my best to keep it as minimal as possible. i wish i didn't even need squeeze, but there was some block that required it and it was easier to just do it as a few lines of code. i figured as long as it is all built by CI, GPL and OSS, I'll get a pass. it is the best we can do today.
try it out, let me know what you think. i promise not to hack your hackernews.
one other thing. the best thing you can do is just run it in a separate profile than the rest of your browsing. i don't do that myself, but it would be slightly more secure that way.
Separate profiles is perfect. Not sure why I haven't been doing this. The keyboard shortcuts are wonderful and enter to open the article is so optimistic! Thank you for dragging me across the finish line. Your extension is glorious.
Edit: I liked the j and noticed it even worked elsewhere (bestcomments is when I ran into it)! None of this is requests, just reflections. Still warming up to the keyboard navigating collapsed comments behavior. Also I think I remember the original HNMarkAllRead 'hide stories' checkbox hid stories after visiting comments. (And there was a hide comments checkbox that when marked only revealed new comments since the last visit) There are lots of workflow permutations to hn!
'j' to the end of the page to go to the next page is awesome. took a bunch of ai tweaking to get all that right.
i actually did this whole multi-layered object model to wrap around the dom to enable pagination more easily. took about 2 days of coding to figure that out. doing it that way made it so that you can even refresh the page and it will 'remember' where active article is. none of the other extensions are this well thought out.
oh and left arrow to open the comments is debatable, but i kind of like it. my reading pattern is to open a bunch of tabs... right/enter to open the story and then left to open the comments... then when i have time, i go through all the 'interesting' stories.
what i'd like to do is add kind of a bookmark and tag system so that you can store what you want to read later and be able to tag it so that you can search for it. favorites is close, but it doesn't quite cover the same use cases.
The way trademarks work is that if you don't actively defend them you weaken your rights. So Anthropic needs to defend their ownership of "Claude". I'm guessing they reached out to Peter Steinberger and asked nicely that he rename Clawdbot.
My old local brewery had a Leggo My Ego[1] beer they also were served a cease and desist by Kellogg over... they still make it, it's just now called the Unlawful Waffle[2] which is a bit funnier if you happen to know the lore/reason.
It’s one of those types you have to be the person that likes that style. It’s my friends favorite rotator but I think it’s a decent try-it-once beer, that is only around for a little while at a time.
The brewery itself though is one of my favorites to this day with, in my opinion, the best food I've ever encountered at something that identifies itself first as a "brewery." I don't visit the area without making a stop there.
> It’s one of those types you have to be the person that likes that style
Yes.
I live in a community that has a very high population of home brewers (beer and spirits mostly). Many of them are needy and use strict techniques (their breweries remind me of the Winnebago meth lab in Breaking Bad) making very good beer and gin.
When we have our local competition of brewers the winner is always some thing like "Belgian Sour". To me a beer that is foul. But to the experienced brewers it is the best.
it’s in the discovery process with a deadline of February 23rd, at which time kellogg’s is to prepare their argument and motion for summary judgement. If that’s denied it tentatively goes to 3-4 day trial in July.
I never saw them again (and I host large food truck festivals here) so I just assumed they threw in the towel. I did not know they are still operating but apparently so.
I have to imagine they’ll spend more time and money fighting this suit than they did starting the food truck. I see no reason you wouldn’t just rebrand. The name is mid at best anyway.
But also, I’m kinda rooting for them. From a distance though.
I'm guessing (NAL) that would actually make it worse. Trademark violation revolves around brand confusion. If you actually serve their product you are making that _much_ more likely (in my uninformed opinion anyway).
Otherwise it's a standalone argument about a stupid pun applied to food in general.
It actually looks like they were pretty reasonable here, as they offered money for the company to help rebrand even though they were clearly infringing on their copyright. Of course, there are three sides to every story.
To me, this would be the expected second step, for someone infringing on their trademark. Like if a person steals your car, then you confront them and try to strike a deal to prevent involvement of authorities. If you ignore that, I think it is reasonable to expect them to report you to the police, and you to get charged with theft.
I don't think they expect to actually get 15M from this suit. Honestly, it seems like they wanted to avoid the suit altogether, because of how it looks from a PR POV.
I’m not GP, but I can take a crack: A case against a limited liability corporation for infringing on a trademark is not like murdering someone and burning down their house because no one ends up dead and no houses are burned down, and it is an appealable judgement made by a court based in legal precedent.
The damages listed in a lawsuit have nothing at all to do with the reasonableness of the parties involved.
By the time a lawsuit is filed you are already deep into a civil dispute, and very few civil disputes ever go to trial. Filing a lawsuit at all is the nuclear option for when all reasonableness has already broken down. You only go to court as the nuclear option after both parties reach an impasse.
15M is almost certainly just a result of mathematically adding up the damages the law provides for. That's how going to court generally works -- your lawyer will ask the court for everything the law provides for. Then the court will decide what is reasonable to actually award. Going to court is very expensive, and it is why ~99% of cases settle before going to court.
Clearly infringing on what? Do they have "leggo my eggo" itself trademarked? And is it really reasonable to think there's consumer confusion between a waffle and an egg roll that isn't using the word "eggo"?
I would say they're clearly not infringing on any plain "eggo" trademark.
The entire business is branded like Eggo waffles. The colors used, the font and stylistic “E” are the same, the white outlining of red letters on a yellow field is copied. It isn’t just the name and phrase, the entire brand is copied over.
I’m not making a judgment on the morality of the law. But under the law itself, I can completely understand how Kellog’s has a strong claim here
The stylistic 'E' actually looks nothing alike if you look at the picture in the complaint linked elsewhere in the thread[0]. Just about the only similarity is that it's vaguely cursive red with white outline. The 'E' is probably the most obviously different part.
It's immediately obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that it's a parody, so only a corporate lawyer could be so dishonest as to write that it's "likely to deceive and cause confusion, mistake, or deception among consumers or potential consumers as to the source of origin of Defendant’s goods and services and the sponsorship or endorsement of those goods and services by Kellogg". Their truck screams "this does not follow modern 'corporate' branding/style guides, so is obviously not approved or associated with a multinational company like Kellogg."
Quite interesting to see the product placement examples in the document though as evidence their "renown".
Are you looking at the Eggo logo in that filing from the 30s? If you look at the modern Eggo logo shown later in the filing compared to the egg roll trucks usage of it in “L’Eggo my eggroll” it is clearly so similar that it is hard to distinguish which “L’Eggo” belongs to the truck if you isolate them.
Parody and fair use are also significantly weakened in law when the use is commercial and without social commentary. Protected parody needs to be more than “I copied your branding style for my business”.
Again I’m not arguing that the law is moral or immoral, just that Kellog’s has a strong claim here under the law given that the branding as a whole is clearly copied from the Eggo brand, and that there is no evidence here that the food truck is trying to make fair use for the purposes of free speech, commentary or parody.
Is anyone going to confuse a waffle with an eggroll? No. But it is perfectly reasonable to think that the food truck is somehow associated with the Eggo food brand. Large corporations do stuff like operate offshoots and pop ups in adjacent niches. Look to IHOP’s brief marketing stunt rebrand to IHOB for an example.
I'm looking at all of what's in that document. The 'E' is literally the most dissimilar letter. It's very obviously distinct, and even more obviously distinct when isolated. In any case, they might legally prevail, but let's not kid ourselves: no one is going to be confused. The lawyer who wrote that is not just immoral in some abstract sense; they are concretely a disingenuous liar.
Arguing the "E" in the "Eggo" trademark and the "E" on the egg roll truck are so distinct that anyone arguing it must be lying is not a reasonable position.
My commentary on the 'E' is a response to that being specifically called out as the same in an earlier comment when it's specifically not the same if you actually look at it. The bit about the lawyer lying is what I quoted from the court document: that it's "likely to deceive and cause confusion, mistake, or deception among consumers or potential consumers" about whether this is endorsed or associated with Kellogg. And yes let's not kid ourselves, that is a lie. No one including the lawyer thinks that's true. Saying things that you obviously think are untrue is lying, even if you do it professionally.
I called out the E as one of numerous obvious similarities in the styling of the motto, not specifically. You are choosing to focus on just the E instead of the other similar elements taken as a whole. We can drop the disagreement over that specific letter and my argument as a whole still stands.
Here’s the only context I
Mentioned the E:
“The entire business is branded like Eggo waffles. The colors used, the font and stylistic “E” are the same, the white outlining of red letters on a yellow field is copied. It isn’t just the name and phrase, the entire brand is copied over.”
If it were just the E it wouldn’t be much of a claim. But it is clear to even a casual observer that the food truck business’ entire brand is based exclusively on recognizable elements of the Eggo brand.
You keep acting like Kellog’s is a villain here, but according to both parties Kellog’s attempted to resolve this amicably out of court. They went so far as to offer to pay for the cost of rebranding the truck as a goodwill effort and contacted the lawyer representing the food truck’s corporation over the course of months in attempts to solve it out of court.
It's based on recognizable elements because it's clearly parodying them; they are not copying the brand. They are not relying on people thinking there's an endorsement or association with Kellogg. They're relying on a chuckle. This stuff is all obvious to anyone with enough reasoning ability to pass the LSAT (or anyone who can pass middle school), so obviously any lawyer who claims otherwise is a disingenuous liar.
Lying like that might be par for the course, but that's why lawyers have a bit of a poor reputation when it comes to ethics.
I only mentioned the E because you did, and it's the most obvious element to display that in fact the font is completely different; the only similarity is "vaguely cursive". It's that sort of "clearly referencing X but obviously 'off'" look that parodies shoot for.
Parody defense typically relies on there being an underlying comment about the brand or product. Commercial use with no clear speech purpose will not be looked on favorably by a court. Copying someone’s brand isn’t a parody by the court’s Rogers test which will be applied in this case to determine if it is a legal parody.
The Rogers test:
> First, the Court must determine whether the work at issue is “expressive” — that is, does the work “communicat[e] ideas or express[ ] points of view.”
Second, if the work is expressive, then the plaintiff must show that the defendant’s use of the trademark either (i) is not artistically relevant to the work, or (ii) is explicitly misleading to consumers as to the source or content of the work.
There is no idea or point of view being communicated by naming your business L’Eggo my Eggroll and copying the colors and style, and I haven’t seen the defendants arguing that. So the second part of the test won’t even be considered.
There actually is case law around bad puns/rhymes as parody branding (Bad Spaniels dog toy shaped and styled like Jack Daniel’s bottle). The court did not accept it as fair use since there isn’t a comment or idea being communicated. It doesn’t matter that no one is going to confuse a dog toy with a bottle of whisky. “We operate an eggroll food truck” is not going to be accepted as an idea or comment for the purposes of parody.
They could argue that they are not actually copying the trademark, but the use of the phrase and colors is pretty damning even if you accept that the cursive is not the same (I don’t see a court buying that the cursive is different enough. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t a stencil perfect match in the totality of circumstances.) This argument is also mutually exclusive to the parody argument since it attempts to deny that there is any brand similarity.
Ironically, someone could now sell t-shirts saying “L’Eggo my trademark” using the exact font and it would be pretty clear fair use parody of Kellog’s lawsuit. It would be a comment specifically poking fun of them suing over that phrase and branding, and the absurdities of trademark law.
I’m not saying that any of this is right or wrong, I’m just saying that from a legal perspective Kellog’s is on pretty firm ground from all publicly known information.
The latest I can find on Bad Spaniels is that the courts concluded they did not infringe the trademark exactly because it was an obvious parody, but that it tarnished the brand because of the association with dog feces[0]. Notably, it seems that brand confusion is still central to the infringement question, and SCOTUS ruled that parody plays into that.
> Reaching the Supreme Court, the case took another turn in 2023 when the Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision, unanimously ruling that the Rogers test does not apply in cases when a trademark is used as a source identifier, rather than as a purely artistic work. As a result, the Supreme Court remanded the case for the district court to reconsider Jack Daniel’s counterclaims under traditional trademark principles.
In the food truck case, clearly they are using it as their own brand identifier (so it's analogous to Bad Spaniels), and clearly it is a parody, so clearly it is not trademark infringement as with BS. Unlike the BS case, they're also not tarnishing the Eggo brand, but just making a playful pun, so that outcome doesn't seem likely here.
You misinterpreted the outcome of that case. The ninth circuit ruling was in favor of VIP. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling and said the lower court needed to discard the rogers test as exculpatory for VIP/BS.
I’ll use a direct quote from your own source to explain how the actual ruling ended up losing the case for BS:
…the district court found that it nevertheless dilutes the fame and distinctiveness of the whiskey maker’s reputation, thereby still running afoul of the Lanham Act’s anti-dilution provisions. The amended order follows the Supreme Court’s decision ending the application of the more liberal Rogers First Amendment test in trademark cases involving expressive works used as source identifiers. In doing so, while finding that the parody of the “Bad Spaniels” dog toy decreased the likelihood of confusion with Jack Daniel’s by modifying the analysis of certain factors in a light more favorable to VIP, the district court ultimately found VIP’s parody of the famous whiskey brand to be a double-edged sword that contributed to finding dilution by tarnishment.
/quote
The Supreme Court case said that because they were using a trademark as a brand identifier they couldn’t argue for a rogers test exemption. In other words if you use someone else’s trademark, even as a riff or joke, in your trademark, the bar is much higher. L’Eggo my Eggroll is doing exactly that.
Your argument that “In the food truck case, clearly they are using it as their own brand identifier (so it's analogous to Bad Spaniels)” perfectly encapsulates why this is a violation once you grok the outcome of the court case. Bravo for phrasing it so succinctly.
But it's not tarnishment. In the BS case, they found that it wasn't infringement, but that they were using it in a way that would cause reputational damage (also dubious, but sure). Here it would seem the claim that it causes reputational damage is even more tenuous; the food truck is not portraying them in any kind of negative light. In fact, an even better fit is likely the Chewy Vuitton toys[0]:
> While it is true that finding a mark to be strong and famous usually favors the plaintiff in a trademark infringement case, the opposite may be true when a legitimate claim of parody is involved. As the district court observed, "In cases of parody, a strong mark’s fame and popularity is precisely the mechanism by which likelihood of confusion is avoided."
> In a similar vein, when considering factors (v) and (vi), it becomes apparent that Haute Diggity Dog intentionally associated its marks, but only partially and certainly imperfectly, so as to convey the simultaneous message that it was not in fact a source of LVM products. Rather, as a parody, it separated itself from the LVM marks in order to make fun of them.
In the BS case, SCOTUS explicitly noted that parody is a factor in determining confusion and therefore infringement[1]:
> But a trademark’s expressive message—particularly a parodic one, as VIP asserts—may properly figure in assessing the likelihood of confusion ... So although VIP’s effort to ridicule Jack Daniel’s does not justify use of the Rogers test, it may make a difference in the standard trademark analysis. Consistent with our ordinary practice, we remand that issue to the courts below.
And then the ultimate conclusion was that it was not infringement. SCOTUS ruled the lower court had taken an incorrect shortcut, but ultimately the answer (on the infringement question) was the same for basically the same reason.
I guess, but it's still distasteful, especially when it's a corporation saying it and the corporation is incentivized to exaggerate/mislead to an extreme.
> You also cannot "lie" about an opinion about what might confuse other people.
What are you talking about? Of course you can lie about your opinion. And the opinion involving other people doesn't change that.
I'll do it right now: I think basically nobody likes ice cream, they're all faking it to fit in.
The full complaint linked above has a full list of trademarks. There's also a claim for trade dress infringement, since the food truck uses the same font and red-yellow-white color scheme.
If Kellogg doesn't defend their trademark, they lose it.
An amicable middle ground might be for Kellogg to let the business purchase rights for $1, but if that happened it would open up a flood of this.
Kellogg has so much money in that brand recognition, they'd lose far more than $15 million if it became a generic slogan. The $15 million is a token amount to get the small business to abandon its use. Kellogg doesn't want to litigate. They tried several times not to litigate.
I'm sure Kellogg would be happy to pay the business more than the cost of repainting their truck, buying some marketing materials, pay for the trouble, etc. It's easy good will press for Kellogg and the business gets a funny story and their own marketing anecdote. It's cheaper than litigation, too.
If you look at the court filings linked elsewhere in this thread, it isn't as simple as just a slogan. They copied the trade dress to the point that the truck looks like a Kelloggs waffle box.
Trademark law does have carveouts for people that are selling different products, doing parody, etc. But that isn't what this is.
There are carveouts for things like parody and fair use, but running a restaurant that uses wordplay of a very specific marketing phrase, the same colors and fonts, and branding
is the issue.
If you go look at pictures of the truck, the business branding, and other things it is very clear why Kellog’s has a good argument that their trademark is being used in a way that could damage the brand, or confuse consumers.
This isn't a "supposed law" or some new interpretation, this is pretty well established part of trademark law dating back to the 1800s in the US.
The flip side of the law is that you have to be active in defending and using your trademark if you want to keep it. It prevents the sort of patent troll abuses we see in that system.
If "Leggo my Eggo" was last used years ago by Kellogs, and they haven't used it or defended it or other "Eggo" related trademarks since then, a court is much more likely to allow the use by other businesses, even if Kellog's still hold the registered trademark.
Kellog's choices here are to risk losing or weakening the trademark as a whole, or to sue since the other party has rejected other solutions.
If you were taught that law you were also taught that every use of a given word doesn't immediately mean infringement if it doesn't present a danger of confusion.
This tone is unnecessary, unhelpful and against the spirit and rules of the site. It also doesn’t advance the conversation. If you disagree, that’s fine, but refrain from using invalid techniques like ad hominem attacks and straw men arguments.
Edit: looked at your comment history and realized I’m not going to get anywhere with this. This is just how you behave when presented with information.
Rules of this site also ask for argumentation that goes beyond "someone sued so they must be right".
You made a claim of trademark infringement when in reality no such thing was actually proven. You just automatically assumed the big corp was right based on something that even the lawyers don't yet agree on. I'm sorry if me calling you out on your bullshit makes you angry to the point where you felt the need to sift through my posts for a personal attack.
> The way trademarks work is that if you don't actively defend them you weaken your rights.
I mean this is the OP sentence, it's not about the food truck, it's about setting a precedent that you don't care, which costs you later when a competing brand starts distributing in a way that can actually confuse consumers.
Courts will look at the level of systematic tolerance. If you have a history of vigorous enforcement, it will be harder to argue in the future that a borderline dilution should be allowed.
If you allow borderline dilution, the court is going to consider what you have let other people get away with in the past.
I would still be interested in a real case where a trademark owner ignored a borderline case and this later resulted in an adverse ruling when a more concrete interest was at stake.
Amstar Corp. v. Domino’s Pizza, Inc., 615 F.2d 252 (5th Cir. 1980) The record showed a history of extensive third‑party “Domino” uses (including other food and grocery products). That crowded field made Amstar’s DOMINO relatively weak outside sugar, and Domino’s Pizza prevailed. Link:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/615...
Honestly the decision to name it Clawd was so obviously spectacularly stupid and immature that it makes me wonder about the whole project? I won't try it.
Of course Anthropic has the most obnoxious legal team of all the ai companies. The project got traction under the older name. A name change does hurt the project.
I don't think it's obnoxious to protect your trademark against a literal homophone operating in the same space as you. I'm confident a lot of people heard about "clawdbot" and assumed it was an anthropic product.
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