The name "Hacker News India" a ripoff?

[Shantanu Kumar]

Hi,

I noticed tweets calling the name "Hacker News India" a rip-off:

http://twitter.com/#!/ravi_mohan/status/4457314916507649

There are more such tweets. I guess it would be apt to politely post
about HNI on HN and request PG to consider this the sincerest form of
flattery. :-)

Regards,
Shantanu

[Avi Mehta]

And in addition, I suppose we could change the name too. It is good to adopt an idea and use it. Its another thing to actually copy the copyrighted(I assume) name.

[Prateek Dayal]

I don't think the name is copyrighted (not by YC as I could not find anything there). Also, I have posted about it on HN and Arc forums. 

If I get any request/notice from YC to change it, I will do it and redirect people to the new site. Since we are using the same software to run the place and we are very clearly not for profit, I don't see a problem in calling it Hacker News India. Its a lot easier to get the message across to people with this name. 

In fact Hacker News was formerly called Startup News and so Startup News India would also be a ripoff too.

Just my two cents

Prateek

--
Prateek Dayal
Chief Hacker, Muziboo.com

www.prateekdayal.net | devblog.muziboo.com | www.muziboo.com

[gOLeM @ Chaos-Sanctuary]

That looks *a lot* like an attention seeking tweet/post. I'd simply
ignore it. Its not like we are ripping off the idea and making
billions from it. And more over its just that we are trying to tell
that its similar to HN

Posting it on HN about HNI is a good idea though.

Aditya

--
Security is mostly a superstition.... Life is either a daring
adventure, or nothing. -- Helen Keller

[Mayank Sharma]

I know I shouldn't be doing this, but can you all up-vote this link on hackernews (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908893) so that we can have more ^global^ feedback on our humble efforts. Thanks prateek for posting it.

-Mayank

[Niyaz PK]

Changing the name is the best course of action. The name 'hackers
news' may not be copyrighted, but that does not make using the exact
same name the right thing to do.

The name hacker news india may deceive at least a few people into
believing that this site is somehow affiliated to the original site.

Furthermore, I don't think that using the same name will somehow make
the site in par with the original hacker news. It will be the quality
of the discussions that will decide the fate of the site.

I believe that the same name was used with the best of intentions, but
now that the mistake is being pointed out, it is better to change the
name.

>>>> http://twitter.com/#!/ravi_mohan/status/4457314916507649<http://twitter.com/#%21/ravi_mohan/status/4457314916507649>

>>>>
>>>> There are more such tweets. I guess it would be apt to politely post
>>>> about HNI on HN and request PG to consider this the sincerest form of
>>>> flattery. :-)
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Shantanu
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Prateek Dayal
>> Chief Hacker, Muziboo.com
>>
>> www.prateekdayal.net | devblog.muziboo.com | www.muziboo.com
>>
>

--
- Niyaz

[Mohammed Fazalullah]

Well we could take a consensus based on what reaction the post by Prateek on HN  is getting.

Maybe by the end of the day.

Feeling bad though we would have to change the name from Hacker News to something else. 

[Niyaz PK]

Even though I said earlier that the name does not define the quality
of the site, the name may cause the demographics of the site to
change. For example, 'Programming News India' will cause a lot of
unwanted noob programming questions to be posted in the site. (You
know the 'plz send me d codez' type).

Similarly I personally will stay away from the name 'Startup News'
too. One reason is that the was originally used for Hacker News.
Another reason is that I am afraid that this name too will bring in a
lot of low quality seo guys masquerading as startup guys. (I suspect
that this may be one reason why the name of HN was changed)

Some obscure or made up name with 'india' in the end should work fine imho.

--
- Niyaz

[Nithya Dayal]

Rules should be followed by the spirit and not by the word. If you go by the spirit of HN, using their name to convey the purpose of the forum is a sensible move. Copyright laws exist to protect business interests. Neither PG nor the guys behind this forum have any business interest. I don't think PG open sourced the code base with a fine print that the name shouldn't be used. Hence there is nothing evil if the name stays on. Also, HN is technically news.ycombinator and hackernews.com is quite a different site. When the intent for using the name is so straightforward, let's not fret over problems that we love inventing. 

Best,

Nithya

http://nithyadayal.com/blog

--
Nithya Dayal,
http://nithyadayal.com/blog

[Saurabh Minni]

Wait, whats wrong with it even being a rip off. Wasnt this group inspired from HN in the first place ???

I dont see any wrong if the group chooses to build a website to continue the conversation

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi,

Quite frankly I don't see what the big fuss is. We can call it
Bharatiya Rashtriya Hacker Samachar if we want to but still some
random people will have a problem with it. This is relevant, concise,
self explanatory and memorable.

I usually avoid participating in discussions about naming and other
relatively non-consequential things, but I would appreciate it if you
could take a minute and have a read through this:

www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers

It's by Poul Henning Kemp - a FreeBSD author and the guy responsible
for the magical Varnish Caching Server. And also, please, if you
disagree with someone in the future, please don't do something
unprofessional like a non-constructive rant on Twitter saying "WTF
these guys are stupid lol".

Thank you for your time,
Anirudh

--
http://anirudhsanjeev.org

[akashmanohar]

Anirudh,

Totally agree.

And that "Bharatiya Rashtriya Hacker Samachar" name you just gave it
was excellent :)

For a moment I thought why not name it like that. You can extend it to
a hacker political party later :P

On Nov 16, 9:36 pm, Anirudh Sanjeev <anir...@anirudhsanjeev.org>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Quite frankly I don't see what the big fuss is. We can call it
> Bharatiya Rashtriya Hacker Samachar if we want to but still some
> random people will have a problem with it. This is relevant, concise,
> self explanatory and memorable.
>
> I usually avoid participating in discussions about naming and other
> relatively non-consequential things, but I would appreciate it if you
> could take a minute and have a read through this:
>

> www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/...

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:24 PM, akashmanohar <akashm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And that "Bharatiya Rashtriya Hacker Samachar" name you just gave it
> was excellent :)

I was trying to be sarcastic. I think Hacker News India works just
fine. Unfortunately since I didn't pay any attention to the sentence
structure, people thought I was being serious.

> For a moment I thought why not name it like that. You can extend it to
> a hacker political party later :P

Yes, I'm pretty sure we can replace the Rajya Sabha with a small perl
script. [again, please, sarcasm. thank you :)]

[akashmanohar]

Hey no, I took it as a joke too. When I said I agree, I was referring
to the lines...

"Quite frankly I don't see what the big fuss is."

and

"And also, please, if you
disagree with someone in the future, please don't do something
unprofessional like a non-constructive rant on Twitter saying "WTF
these guys are stupid lol". "

I'm not really bothered about the name too. The current one is just
fine :)

On Nov 17, 9:00 pm, Anirudh Sanjeev <anir...@anirudhsanjeev.org>
wrote:
> Hi,