Trademark on Hacker Inside logo

[John Eldredge]

Did Nashville 2600 come up with the Hacker Inside logo with the Intel-style swoosh? Did we trademark it? If we did trademark it, I suspect it is in the public domain now, as I discovered today that numerous companies are selling merchandise containing the logo, and trademark infringement that isn't challenged promptly enough goes into the public domain.

I happen to know about this because I once worked for a company that had to spend hours each week dealing with trademark infringement. 

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

There's a reason for that.

I'm the copyright holder.  At the time there was a terrible version floating around which used something that looked like the Dollar Store brand of Comic Sans, and one that actually used Comic Sans, and I find low quality/effort artwork to be mildly offensive.

I sat down and basically deconstructed the original font, recreated the lettering that I needed, traced out the swoosh using Corel Draw and then proceeded to generate the eventual result.

There's no trademark on it, and it is technically copyrighted by me (because I published it) but it's effectively public domain because I published it with just one restriction:

Preserve the parody format, so you don't get me sued.

I do occasionally step in when someone tries to take credit for desgining it, but largely that's occasionally happening when someone's pushing it up to somewhere that requires they only use their own copyrighted work or things that are in the public domain.  Some kid basically did that on Wikimedia so that it could be in there, but I think that's finally been sorted out now.  Otherwise, it's appeared in a bunch of stuff (including at least one VR game).  Folks are allowed to do whatever they want with it so long as I'm not getting sued over it.

Outside of the context of a parody (like if someone tries to use it as the logo for their plumbing business, or some 19th hole bar or something) they run the risk of being sued by Intel.

On Sat, Nov 5, 2022 at 4:34 PM John Eldredge <jo...@nashville2600.org> wrote:

Did Nashville 2600 come up with the Hacker Inside logo with the Intel-style swoosh? Did we trademark it? If we did trademark it, I suspect it is in the public domain now, as I discovered today that numerous companies are selling merchandise containing the logo, and trademark infringement that isn't challenged promptly enough goes into the public domain.

I happen to know about this because I once worked for a company that had to spend hours each week dealing with trademark infringement. 

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