This is a lame move by Pair Networks. It reminds me of the days when Sun went around threatening random businesses that had "Java" in their name. I'm glad someone is standing up to these thugs.
In which, some lawyers hilariously try to argue that people might be confused when trying to buy some SPARC hardware, and could end up with a crate full of Arduinos, and the vague nagging feeling that it's going to take more than a beowulf cluster to placate their C*O.
They have to actively protect their trademark. I would say it was shortsighted of Pair Networks to have chosen such a generic term in the first place. But having done so, they have no option but to legally and aggressively protect it or they may not be able to lay claim to it in the future. Pair should have known this and their advisors should have advised them of a probable lawsuit.
The boneheaded move for Pair Networks would be to sit back and let some other company hijack their brand and identification when they have legal recourse.
I've known about Pair Networks for at least 10 years. I didn't for one second think that a new social networking app named Pair had anything to do with them.
I can't say I'm totally unsympathetic towards Pair Networks though. If I was Pair Networks I would probably be annoyed that a Pair social networking app was getting popular. Then again I'd probably be hoping they became a billion dollar company so it would make sense for them to trade me a $10M+ chunk of equity for my domain.
I definitely wouldn't sue them though. Being annoyed doesn't justify being a bully.
They must defend their trademark in order to maintain it. Maybe this is enough of a grey area that they could have let it pass, but letting your trademark go generic can be bad for some companies. I don't know if there's a way to do this without suing, but maybe contacting trypair directly and getting something in writing that trypair recognizes pair Networks priority in (hosting, etc.) classes and will never enter those classes under the name Pair, would be ok.
(in practice, I don't think pair needs rely that much on their trademark -- people don't really shop for hosting services casually, and the canonical domain pair.com is an adequate identifier).
This seems like a reasonable civil disagreement where no one needs to actually pitchfork either side.
Agreed. As soon as I got past the "why on earth is Pair joining YC?" and realized that Pair wasn't Pair, my next thought was "doesn't anyone at YC have enough sense to advise against using the name of a very large and well established company?"
Starting a mobile software company called Pair and saying "but we're a mobile software company, not a web hosting company" is like starting a motorized bicycle company called General Motors and saying "but we're selling motorized bicycles, not cars". I don't know or care what the lawyers are going to make out of this; it stinks no matter who wins.
Your analogy is only valid in a world where an ice cream company could pivot into making cars without anyone blinking (except for the occasional blog post about how free ice cream is evil because the company behind it might decide to start making cars instead).
Are you claiming that Pair Networks could pivot into being a mobile app for couples? Or that Pair could pivot into being an ISP? Because they both seem equally unlikely.
Yes, they both seem unlikely. But I never expected an MMORPG or a mash-up of foursquare and mafia wars to turn into photo sharing websites... or for a group of people who want to put art galleries onto the web to end up building retail stores.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but at this point I'm not convinced that the words "internet startup", "unlikely", and "pivot" belong in the same sentence.
It's even more different than that — at least those are both companies. This is a hosting company and a dating app. They have about as much in common as General Motors and a hamburger.
"some kind of Internet company" was probably specific enough that I would agree with pair Networks...if it were 1992, not 2012.
It would be basically impossible to have a new company of any kind today which didn't have some connection to the Internet. There's a reason the trademark law recognizes many classes of trade, and lets trademarks be re-used across them -- otherwise we end up with really unwieldy non human friendly names for everything.
Neither pair Networks nor Pair the app would qualify for "well known" status in any sane world. I agree Coca Cola probably would have an argument (under well known status) to prevent Coca Cola the app from being developed by someone doing drug-fueled foursome matchmaking, but that's because Coca Cola is well known.
We'll have to disagree about how well known Pair Networks is. They were one of the first and largest commercial web hosting companies in the world. I can't help think that anyone who doesn't immediately think of them when the name "Pair" hasn't been around very long.
But maybe I'm just being an old fart. It seems to happen increasingly often these days.
I don't think any hosting company is "well known" by the statutory definition for trademarks. AWS, EC2 are probably not well known trademarks. A few businesses with ancillary hosting might be (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, etc.) but not hosting providers themselves.
(I've known of/used pair for a very long time, and yes, pair networks is the first thing I think of when I hear the name...)
Well known basically means it is unthinkable that anyone would not strongly associate the word with the famous company. You couldn't be "Coca-Cola Automotive".
Since the standard is what the "general public" would think, I think it's also basically impossible for any b2b or non-consumer company to have a "well known" trademark. "DuPont" is a borderline case.
This is a technical term; similar to a mathematician's "trivial", which doesn't mean what you'd normally think in plain language :)
I'm a long term user of pair.com's service, and my feelings are mixed on this.
I tend to think that "Pair" is no more unique than the "Scrolls" term that Mojang/Bethesda were arguing about in the games area recently.
In this case, the product types are even more different (dating vs web hosting).
Personally I think that Pair (the dating app) was pretty dumb by picking that name when they don't own it as a domain - historically I've disagreed with say 37signals and their arguments that owning the obvious domain names of their products not mattering. It does matter, whether or not you buy into "everyone uses search to find things", if only to reduce the likelyhood of phishing attacks.
In short, don't confuse people. Don't launch a product with a name that is someone else's domain (unless it's a scummy/obvious squatter). Do own the domain that corresponds to your product. This make sense, other things generally do not.
It sounds nice, but in practice, this advice is basically a more positive way of saying "Choose a horrible name that's impossible to remember" — because those are pretty much your only choices. All simple words are taken. A huge amount of sensible phrases are taken. You can get creative and go the Dribbble route, but now you get the downside of not owning the domain most people expect and the downside of having a horrible name.
I hate to say this but since I started using pair.com back in 2002 anytime I hear the name "pair" they're the first company in the tech space that comes to mind. But of course I'm an old timer around these parts...
I have mixed feelings about this. When I first heard about the Pair social app, it was in the context of a discussion about social apps, and I never thought about Pair.com.
Since then though, about half the time I've seen or heard me tionof the new Pair app, I've had confusion about how Pair.com is suddenly a topic of conversation again.
For what it is worth, I used to be a Pair customer, but ditched them for Linode in search of better Wordpress price/performance.
