[SpaceNugget]

It's a company who bought the domain of the exact name of the largest open source project that they directly compete with and then advertise themselves on it? This is at the very least unethical. You can't just use a competitors exact name to run a website that tries to snipe users looking for your competitor and call it a "fan site".

The comments on this submission are pretty strange. What are the chances that a bunch of non-sockpuppet HN type of people are in support of this kind of garbage? Generally with sort of abysmal behaviour like the email communication in the article, there's people going to bat against actually defensible actions purely in the name of civility on HN. These bitvise people seem bad from both angles and yet the of early comments are either ignoring the issue and redirecting (e.g. "who even uses putty") or outright defending their shitty behaviour?

[whywhywhywhy]

It's definitely unethical but the creator of Putty keeps insisting and repeating that the Putty website is the long old homepage style URL and "always has been" and "if people search they can find it".

I think if they actually have a problem with it and are not just repeating that to cope they need to start acting like they have a problem with it. Trademarks need defending and you come out the door with the mental model that it's yours, you own it, the other group are in the wrong. If you opened your trademark dispute with "Well our trademark has always been X and people know to find us at X" you're gonna lose your dispute.

It's just hard to argue it's actually a real problem if the individual it's affecting keeps sort of pretending and saying that it's not even if deep down it is.

[msgodel]

You can buy domain names with competitors names in them. People do this all the time. If you don't want people doing that you need to register the names yourself.

[const_cast]

No, no you can't. I don't know where this misconception comes from.

Trademarks are trademarks, regardless of technology. I can't open a store called McDonald's that isn't a McDonald's but I sell cheeseburgers. Simply... moving this online doesn't magically make laws disappear.

Tech people have a strange misconception that tech overrides laws. No, it doesn't. Calling it "disruption" doesn't count, either.

If bought googlesearch.org but it's my own search engine that's illegal. You can't do that. Even if I did g00glesearch.org that's still illegal.

Even if I don't use the Google name, but I use something similar, maybe with a similar font, that's still illegal. Because, obviously, the intent is to deceive consumers. You can't do that. You can't pretend to be a brand you're not.

[ColinWright]

So someone who has written something and made it available for the common good, and makes no money from it, should now go and buy every possible domain that people might use in a deceptive manner.

This is a great example of what drives people away from providing anything for free.

[Eldt]

That's a good way to lose your domain name