Good question! Whether it’s actually infringement is a legal judgment I’m certainly not qualified to make. 🙂 But my understanding is that it hinges on whether a court thinks a “reasonable person” could be confused. For example, a clothing brand called “Firefoxy” would probably be in the clear since Mozilla isn’t in the clothing business. And maybe even a clothing brand named “Firefox” might be okay! For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records (founded by The Beatles) coexisted nicely for a long time until Apple Computer started getting into the music-selling business. I forget how it got resolved (maybe a licensing agreement?) but The Beatles’ music wasn’t available on the iTunes Music Store for a looooong time while that dispute was going on.

Firefish is an online service and software package, the very space Mozilla operates in, so there’s at least a case to be made that reasonable people might incorrectly assume it’s from Mozilla. It’s come up many times in this discussion already, and we as active Fediverse users are already pretty well informed about this!

The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.

(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)

Look for an instance that has adopted the Mastodon Server Covenant, points 3 and 4 deal with this situation. It’s just a promise, not a guarantee, but most people running such instances are doing it because they care deeply about their community.

Marginalized people would suffer far, far, far more than the bad actors. ☹️ Many people who have been doxxed already go through this, and it’s still near-impossible to stop an online harasser even if you have proof of who they are. It would become dangerous for us to be online at all if this “miracle” were to come about.

It seems like the author is asking “why isn’t there a just-like-Reddit or just-like-Twitter site that was totally ready and waiting for this moment, and even though we’d never heard of it before now has everyone using it?”

Fediverse is different, and that’s a good thing. Because note how all of these corporate social media platforms are ending up…

…nope, can’t use it to chat with my friends and family, we all gave up on Teh Goog and I worked there for over a decade! 😆

(also, by the time you see this, they may have renamed it or introduced a competing messaging app. or both.)

Sorry, I couldn’t read this all the way through. All I hear that author saying is various capitalist-mindset “if it won’t serve everyone and won’t ever become a monopoly that crushes competitors, it’s not worth doing” b.s.

It’s perfectly fine that the Fediverse isn’t the best option for everyone! Geeze!

Ooh ooh, let me make some popcorn before I read this!

That, and also just a preemptive caution from having seen similar discussions go that route in the past. As you implied, it’s virtually impossible to exist in the modern world without being findable and harassable, no matter how careful one is.

Also, I’ll just leave this here. 🙂

It’s creepy af, but let’s all be careful not to victim-blame please.

How long until Google gives up and shuts it down? Place yer bets!!!

I’m issuing an opinion that they’re getting off cheap. But their careers have suffered irreparable harm, so it’s alright. 🙂

I feel certain they’ll settle this suit for a tiny fraction of the extra money they “earned” using this anti-consumer strategy.

I mean this for real: I had an easier time cancelling a gym membership than I did a Prime membership. 🤦‍♀️

I can’t see how they could possibly market a “Game Boy Advance” handheld successfully. It’d have to be something fundamentally different from the Game Boy Colour. 😉

For the average consumer, it’s all about the games. If the next platform has awesome games you can’t play on the current-gen platform, it’ll sell. (Well, barring some disastrous marketing…)

Wishful thinking at best. Nintendo has no incentive to rush forward with a new platform yet. Hardware ain’t where the money is, and they’re not struggling to sell software when they have something good.

Exactly so! 🙂😭

I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.

Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.

Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.

If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.

So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.

It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞

If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).

Probably for reliability and stability — otherwise, every view from every federated instance would create a new request to the hosting instance. The protocol itself would basically DDoS smaller instances. Also you can still read the cached version on your home instance if the remote instance is temporarily down.