Sunday, November 19, 2006

More Digg Trademarks

I just noticed some new trademark wording at the bottom of the digg homepage today. Not sure when it was added, but it might possibly have some ramifications to some digg fansites. The new wording states that:

"DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers,
button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc."

Normally I wouldn't think too deeply about something like this but lets all take a time machine back to August when digg sent a cease and desist order to DiggGames. Kevin Rose wrote about it on the Digg blog, but that was specific to the term 'digg'. With new teminology such as 'dugg' added, could duggtrends/duggmirror be in jeopardy? Hopefully not as they provide an awesome service that is widely used throughout the digg community.

Update - Sites that have been contacted:
Digg2Phone - " With Digg2Phone, you can choose which stories you want us to follow for you, and we'll text message you when something happens."
Digg Card - "Digg card is a way of inserting your Digg.com Profile on to you website."
DiggGames - now games1.org - a listing of all the flash games that have been featured on the frontpage of digg.com

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are quite the astute observer. I hadn't noticed this noticed this until you pointed it out. I think it will be in Digg's best interest to not shut duggmirror down. It only does them a service, and for free.

Anonymous said...

I got a letter from digg's lawyers last week asking me to stop using digg2phone.com, and it cited terms "Dugg it" and "Digg it", as well as logos and the such.

c.thompson said...

This has been in here for a while from what I gather. I saw it months ago on the Digg TOS page at the very bottom, section 13:

http://digg.com/tos

"13 TRADEMARKS

DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, and other Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and service names are registered trademarks, trademarks or trade dress of Digg in the U.S. and/or other countries. Digg's trademarks and trade dress may not be used, including as part of trademarks and/or as part of domain names, in connection with any product or service in any manner that is likely to cause confusion. The images and icons available in the Digg icon pack may used by partner and third party sites in connection with providing appropriate "Digg This" and "Submit to Digg" links to the Digg site."

Interesting to see this paragraph on diggcard.com though:

"The source to the diggcard can be found here, its written in vb.net asp.net 2.0. Its not documented but anyone can download it and do what they want with it but be aware that it is against their TOS to scrape data from their site. I am not responsible for any thing this code does and by downloading it you accept I am not liable for its use. It is only being offered for reference on how to scrap data from a remote html page on downloading it you must not use it on digg.com."

I wouldn't have thought digg wouldn't be so strict as to what people did when scrapping simple little mundane data from their site for use as simply as the diggcard was. I can understand the general concern and reasonings for it, such as bandwidth, and scrapping data from their site, without permission and potential problems they'd have with it...but I figured, especially with the upcoming release of their API, that they wouldn't have as much a problem with things like this.

Anonymous said...

I think it's unfortunate but also it seems neccessary. If you read his blog post it seems this isn't about "shutting anyone down" but about ensuring that google can't open their own digg site and call it "digg."

Rather than sending a cease and desist to duggmirror it would make more sense to contact them and write off on them using the term dugg. The sites don't provide a definate service to digg members will face the C&D letter though.

Anonymous said...

It's exactly what Kevin said last time: Digg is a company and MUST protect its trademarks or lose them.