[jlmb]

There is this additional post:

“Someone who works at Meta reached out and advised me to rename the filters asap.” [1]

So maybe the issue is simply that Pixelfed is using identical filter names.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@dansup/109596825332511647

[cowsup]

Never heard of Pixelfed, but it's sort of shady that, the moment they received notice that they shouldn't be copying a trillion-dollar company's product 1:1, they immediately cry that they need more donations.

Just rename the filters, and maybe make tweaks so they aren't exactly the same, and then suddenly Meta has no standing.

[anthropodie]

> Never heard of Pixelfed,

You may not have but that community is actually very active. I posted 5-6 photos on pixelfed and it had more engagement than my total Instagram engagement over 5-6 years.

[zzzeek]

how is an open source project asking for donations "shady" ? Is my money going to go to some nefarious ends?

This is Hacker News. OSS is supposed to be a good thing.

I just gave them $50, support creators, especially here where we are all benefiting as creators ourselves.

[mschuster91]

Well, with a multi-billion dollar company knocking on the door, they know they may need absurd amounts of money for lawyers, so it makes sense to ask for donations should the situation escalate beyond what pro-bono lawyers can handle.

At the core, the problem is that the US doesn't have many protections for individuals and small businesses that need to fight against mega-corporations. It's simply infeasible to achieve anything outside of small-claims court. Europe is a bit better, but not by much.

[faitswulff]

If I were a small open source project with the prospect of a legal battle on the horizon, I’d want to start raising money for it before, not after, the litigation begins.

[binarymax]

You’ve heard of them now :)

Good for them to call out bullying to spread awareness of their product.

[jrnichols]

Seems that they have done just that.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4037

[themusicgod1]

Or maybe it's a good thing that they are standing up to a 'trillion dollar company'. More people should be doing this.

[kitsune_]

I mean at least Meta chose incredibly original filter names, such as

Juno, the ancient Roman goddess, a word in use for over 2000 years.

Clarendon, the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarendon lists approximately 40+ different uses, from place names to typefaces.

Lark, well, do I have to add anything here?

Ludwig, uhmmm, Beethoven's estate is about to be sued?

Lo-fi: Yes I never heard of this word before in the context of photography. True originators.

Please stop the trademarking of common words and cultural heritage that belong to all of us.

[saurik]

A trademark isn't "you don't get to use this word because I own it now", it is "you don't get to use this word in this context as it is confusing". If you want to name your restaurant Ludwig, go ahead: you just can't name your filter Ludwig. With the exception of Lo-Fi, where maybe you could make a defense, these names are non-obvious and have never been in common use to describe a set of modifications to photographs. Just because Clarendon isn't a unique word does NOT have ANYTHING to do with whether or not you could trademark it for something.

You can't just say "durrrr... I've heard this word before!" you have to actually show that that word has been connected to that context and isn't some otherwise unique usage, and I simply don't see how you are going to claim that for these words: if you show those filters to people and ask them to describe them, the only reason they would say "Clarendon" is because of Instagram's prior usage carefully associating that word with that filter behavior: if you believe otherwise you have to show THAT, not that the word itself has been uttered by someone in the past.

[jdminhbg]

If they both had a filter named Lo-Fi you’d have a point. Having all the same names makes this very obviously just plagiarism.

[brookst]

I’m afraid you may have some misapprehensions about how trademarks work, and I don’t think this is about trademark specifically anyway.

Trademarks do not give someone the exclusive rights to that word in all contexts. Instead, you register a word or phrase and an category. For instance, there are about 1500 trademarks on the word Apple, from laundromats to eyeglasses[0]

But Meta’s complaint here doesn’t seem to be trademark; companies don’t typically trademark every name like filters. But there is lots of other IP law, including trade dress, which is different from trademark.

And much as I love the fediverse and hope it displaces dinosaurs like Meta, I’m surprised anyone would defending taking the filter names em mass and using them to refer to the same visual effects. That is not something one does. Meta is not claiming ownership of all uses of those words in any context, they are saying please don’t rip off the exact words to clone their UX.

[0] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4802%3A...

[alphachloride]

You can say the same for Apple. I think the trademark applies when a common word is used in a distinct business case. Here the word is used as a filter name, for instance. That application is unique.

[anthropodie]

This sounds so stupid. Imagine if the inventor of first button had sued others for copying shape and it's shadow

[cronix]

That would be as silly as a computer company getting a patent for a rectangle with rounded corners.

[aendruk]

What are the names of the filters? I’m not familiar with either app and the commit “renaming” them only inserts the letter `i` in a UI template.

[kemayo]

This person submitted a pull request to actually-rename them, which conveniently shows the full list: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4038/files

[jamal-kumar]

That's one of the funniest things I've seen this month, I had no idea this existed. Making it such a carbon copy yet with a federated backend is something that both feels like a huge feat and something like an amusingly naive oversight.

Honestly impressed as can be but can certainly see that they could have at least tried to differentiate it from its inspiration at least somewhat, like that's just poking bears in eyes with sticks.