I put up a (much less interesting and more nerdily annoyed) site that described how Dannon / Danone was using made-up sciency names for the bacteria in their yoghurt, and their legal department got in touch. I didn't back down: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/legal-action-against-this... I think this example would have been fine if the Waffle House branding had been removed. Then just put a big disclaimer at the top, which also makes clear the silliness of the kinds of legal claims made by these companies.
Your website seems to be an aggregator of surface-level news blurbs from the mainstream media and some interviews with individual physicians. There are claims about "made-up" names and "correct scientific names". Putting health claims aside, there are no citations to any legislation that may have prevented a manufacturer from writing these names on a label. This website has a UK perspective, but I was trying to recall if any FDA or FTC regulations would prohibit the coining of new names for ingredients, particularly organisms. I think not.
In biological taxonomy, new names are coined all the time. Aliases for species are quite common. Common names for species are also common. We just learned that a "Buzzard" in the US is different than "Buzzards" in Europe/UK.
Pharmaceutical companies and scientists coin new "fake Latin-sounding" names all the time. So do astronomers! If there can be an asteroid named "25924 Douglasadams" then why can't Activia add a brand-name alias to something they use? Arguably, bacteria replicate so fast that Danone could have a new species if they cultivated it in a lab, rather than in animals.
Conversely, the food industry has taken names such as "milk" and "water", and expanded their definitions far beyond what common people recognize as those substances. Always receiving legal assent to sell fruit juice [nuts are fruits] with a mammalian name.
I've not had much experience with supplements, but more than a few I've purchased made proprietary blends of substances, and named that blend. Totally FDA-compliant.
I think your website got left up because it's fundamentally not a threat to any such practice in labelling.
I hereby address the candida albicans growing in my intestines, to announce that I dub thee candida hackernewsensis because sitting here has undoubtedly helped it grow.
Your perspective is incredibly US centric, so it is important to note that almost nothing which you note as normal or just happening is okay in the EU.
> Conversely, the food industry has taken names such as "milk" and "water", and expanded their definitions far beyond what common people recognize as those substances. Always receiving legal assent to sell fruit juice [nuts are fruits] with a mammalian name.
People don't seem to be complaining about that substance (not to be named) that usually goes with jelly on bread, and is not actually a dairy product.
I know that all names are essentially "made up". It's the implicit nature of the "sciency" bit that annoys me. I don't believe Danone did a stroke of real science to come up with a bacteria that had any material difference from any other live yoghurt. The astronomers who discovered 25924 Douglasadams did do the science. Do you think Danone did any randomised controlled trials to measure its effectiveness over any other kind of live yoghurt? Of course not.
The idea of the site and its domain name is to try to get to the top of search engine rankings - which it has done successfully - so anyone who searches for it gets a clear answer, rather than just marketing fluff. I noticed that the Pages widget on the right was missing, which I've now reinstated, but here's the background to why I did it: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/about-this-site/
> Always receiving legal assent to sell fruit juice [nuts are fruits] with a mammalian name.
If you mean things like oat milk, it's unlawful in the EU (and I think still the UK) to label plant-based alternatives as milk or dairy under EU Regulation 1308/2013.
if the issue was just using the trademark and likeness, why not just remove those issues of contention, and keep the site up and running under a different domain? it wasn't mentioned that they had an issue with the data scraping.
After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)
I believe scraping is generally ok - there's actual trademark law about trademarks, which is why you got a c+d about trademark usage, instead of a general 'stop what you're doing we don't like it' c+d.
A good point of comparison is steam db (and other similar sites), which uses Steam public info to triangulate market info that isn't immediately apparent.
this is a bummer - scraping is one thing but this was free marketing for them. If only they put their marketing department in front of their legal department (assuming they have a marketing department)
How would that work? The point of waffle house index is the association with waffle house. Without that, you have a unitless statistic unless you assume every visitor is already in the know.
I think the op implies a feed, map, or counter that is relatively fresh. The image you link to is 11 years old. Is there a link to a map no older than say a few hours?
An old acquaintance of mine got a cease and desist from Jim Henson Company over his DJ moniker Mupperfucker. I know trademark holders are required to defend them, so I get it, but also...
This is conjecture but I'm pretty sure the idea of it even being an "index" is a stretch. More like people who work in disaster relief talking about their jobs informally. "I just got back from Town A. They had a tornado but it wasn't too bad. The Waffle House stayed open." "I'm heading to Town B. They've been having flooding so bad the Waffle House has been closed for 12 hours." That sort of thing.
Edit: Apparently FEMA contacts local businesses including Waffle Houses in the areas affected by a disaster to ask how they are doing. This makes sense as an added source of data to gauge the severity of an emergency. Still a stretch to call it the "Waffle House Index".
The mere threat of legal action for most Americans means $$$.
As a college student, probably broke as well. This person probably does not have the legal understanding or access to lawyers to guide him through it.
Much easier to take it down rather than deal with potential legal ramifications.
A half decent lawyer or even the "free" lawyer services at most universities probably would have advised just removing the "trademark" elements as you would.
You ignore the cease and desist, they take you to court (still unlikely because they also incur cost they dont want). You don't need a lawyer to go to a courtroom, they will order you to take it down and then you do. They're very unlikely to sue for damages because the cost of their lawyers far exceed whatever 'damages' are in place here, which I would assume are close to zero.
Please don't fold immediately to this tired legal tactic.
Reminds of the Whataburger app being used about a year ago as someone pointed out the app's location map gave a good indication of Texas power outages. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40927364)
IIRC the marketing team embraced it on social posts and reached out to share some merch as acknowledgment.
Readit News
In biological taxonomy, new names are coined all the time. Aliases for species are quite common. Common names for species are also common. We just learned that a "Buzzard" in the US is different than "Buzzards" in Europe/UK.
Pharmaceutical companies and scientists coin new "fake Latin-sounding" names all the time. So do astronomers! If there can be an asteroid named "25924 Douglasadams" then why can't Activia add a brand-name alias to something they use? Arguably, bacteria replicate so fast that Danone could have a new species if they cultivated it in a lab, rather than in animals.
Conversely, the food industry has taken names such as "milk" and "water", and expanded their definitions far beyond what common people recognize as those substances. Always receiving legal assent to sell fruit juice [nuts are fruits] with a mammalian name.
I've not had much experience with supplements, but more than a few I've purchased made proprietary blends of substances, and named that blend. Totally FDA-compliant.
I think your website got left up because it's fundamentally not a threat to any such practice in labelling.
I hereby address the candida albicans growing in my intestines, to announce that I dub thee candida hackernewsensis because sitting here has undoubtedly helped it grow.
People don't seem to be complaining about that substance (not to be named) that usually goes with jelly on bread, and is not actually a dairy product.
This timeline is interesting: https://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/166/Milk.pdf
The idea of the site and its domain name is to try to get to the top of search engine rankings - which it has done successfully - so anyone who searches for it gets a clear answer, rather than just marketing fluff. I noticed that the Pages widget on the right was missing, which I've now reinstated, but here's the background to why I did it: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/about-this-site/
If you mean things like oat milk, it's unlawful in the EU (and I think still the UK) to label plant-based alternatives as milk or dairy under EU Regulation 1308/2013.
After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)
A good point of comparison is steam db (and other similar sites), which uses Steam public info to triangulate market info that isn't immediately apparent.
https://steamdb.info/
Dead Comment
I wouldn't be so sure about that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index#/media/File...
https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-disney-is-the-proud-owner-of-m...
I am confused about FEMA: are they using some automated process or is it an abandoned index?
This is conjecture but I'm pretty sure the idea of it even being an "index" is a stretch. More like people who work in disaster relief talking about their jobs informally. "I just got back from Town A. They had a tornado but it wasn't too bad. The Waffle House stayed open." "I'm heading to Town B. They've been having flooding so bad the Waffle House has been closed for 12 hours." That sort of thing.
Edit: Apparently FEMA contacts local businesses including Waffle Houses in the areas affected by a disaster to ask how they are doing. This makes sense as an added source of data to gauge the severity of an emergency. Still a stretch to call it the "Waffle House Index".
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/01/waffle-ho...
also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index?useskin=vec...
As a college student, probably broke as well. This person probably does not have the legal understanding or access to lawyers to guide him through it.
Much easier to take it down rather than deal with potential legal ramifications.
A half decent lawyer or even the "free" lawyer services at most universities probably would have advised just removing the "trademark" elements as you would.
Please don't fold immediately to this tired legal tactic.
IIRC the marketing team embraced it on social posts and reached out to share some merch as acknowledgment.