Top
Best
New

Posted by maxloh 6 days ago

Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac(notepad-plus-plus.org)
633 points | 304 commentspage 4
jonenst 5 days ago|
I wonder how the legal battle will develop : the trademark https://data.inpi.fr/marques/FR5133202 is France only I think ? So a Paris resident infringed upon by a NYC resident, with content on github and also a website registered with godaddy (according to whois) and using cloudflare dns servers. Good luck sorting everything out. Although maybe the relative fame of the project will act as a lubricant/privilege in this case ? (IANAL but if this case is as obvious as it looks, speed would be good. And ideally it would be fast for any such case, not just the famous ones)
albertzeyer 6 days ago||
Why not just getting the changes/extensions upstream, welcome the Mac dev on the team, and make it an official port?
f3408fh 6 days ago||
You don’t adopt an unofficial fork just because it exists. Showing up with a clone isn’t the same as meeting the standards required to be part of the original project
dewey 6 days ago|||
That might have been a possibility if brought forward in an open and reasonable way, a bit harder to trust someone once they just vibe adopted the project someone was working on for decades and didn't seen an issue with that. Also "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
tencentshill 5 days ago|||
The "author" couldn't tell you the why behind any of the original design decisions. It's vibecoded, they never had to know. They would be a terrible teammate with no actual understanding of the project.
lukan 6 days ago|||
Maybe there are trust issues now? I certainly would refuse to work with someone who comes and steals my brand, pretends I am on board with this and refuses to comply even after being called out.
Fokamul 5 days ago|||
Author of this Mac port has 1 month old online presence.
LeCompteSftware 5 days ago||
Nobody else has pointed this out, but a MacOS port of Notepad++ actually goes against some of the branding. Notepad++ very much markets itself as a lightweight and speedy thing that uses the low-level Win32 API directly. It is not just a native application, it is a Windows-native application. Porting it to macOS requires a level of care and expertise which is tantamount to changing the entire organization.

I am sure the Notepad++ team is perfectly fine focusing on Windows expertise and has no interest in bringing in the overhead of another OS. If a serious macOS expert wants to do that, they can fork the project with a different name.

BTW look at the GitHub issues. This is a lazy developer creating a slop project. It would be stupid to bring this incompetent and dishonest person on board.

omblivion 6 days ago||
It is astonishing how blatant people can be. How do they imagine they won't be immediately called out?

Hopefully the domain and the app on the app store gets taken down soon.

odie5533 6 days ago|
He probably didn't know it was trademarked, and probably didn't think people would get upset, and he's now trying to make it right. Why assume malice on this guy?
efilife 6 days ago|||
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.

He seems to have enough experience to know how trademarks work

tristor 5 days ago||||
> He probably didn't know it was trademarked

The fact it's trademarked provides the original project more legal protections, but regardless of whether or not a trademark is registered it's clearly unethical to use another project's name without prior permission. If it weren't a trademark violation, it'd still be wrong, so the knowledge of whether or not it was registered as a trademark is basically irrelevant.

kube-system 5 days ago||||
Someone who understands trademark law knows that it doesn't even matter whether it is a registered trademark... because it is well known enough to clearly be an unregistered trademark by default.
layer8 6 days ago|||
GP isn’t assuming malice, they are wondering how someone can be so foolish or naive.
AppAttestationz 5 days ago||
Notepad+++ was born.
_el1s7 5 days ago||
Trademark infringement seems to be rising these days, thanks to AI slop. Surprisingly, the domain registrars and hosting providers don't really seem to care much about these issues.

To takedown something that is infringing your brand, you would have to spend time and money dealing with bureaucratic procedures.

andai 6 days ago||
Not to be confused with

https://notepadexe.com/

hmokiguess 5 days ago|
Oh cool, this one reminded me of https://www.codeedit.app/ I like the lightweight take!
emsign 5 days ago||
Deepfaked software?
yahyabahhaoui 6 days ago||
whats the point on doing that? is it a malware or some kind of trojan?
kjs3 5 days ago|
Not that that isn't a possibility (now muted), but you don't have to speculate on a grand conspiracy when 'just an asshole' will suffice.
codegax 4 days ago||
[dead]
codegax 4 days ago|
[dead]
More comments...