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 :)
