(2015-01-20, 04:33)Eleazar Coding Wrote: As far as I know that was fine @natethomas - I read the trademark guidelines at least 30 times line for line to make sure that we followed them to the tee.
Yup. I'm aware. The issue with the TVAddons site has always been the same. The goal is never "Do everything we can to avoid confusion." The goal is always, "Do everything we possibly can to increase confusion and our own SEO page rank, so long as we stay within the exact wording of the rules."
So you have a domain called tvaddons. But You don't title the site tvaddons. You title it "XBMC Addons for Kodi." You borrow the exact layout used by our download page, write "XBMC for etc" and then link to the TVMC app instead of any actual XBMC app. It's like you (or whoever makes the site) take a personal pleasure in looking and acting like the world's biggest rip-off artist, sowing as much confusion as you possibly can, while always staying within the letter of the law.
The absurdity of complaining about these other sites is that most of them have absolutely no idea they're violating our trademark rules. And they have no idea because your site so successfully convinced them that you were us. We went to CES this year, and do you know, almost no chinese manufacturer had any idea that your site and our site were different? Lot's of them proudly announced that they ran your addons, and a couple even acted like we should be really pleased about it, because they thought we were you. The absurdity of complaining about websites that are violating our policy because YOU duped them is just... it's next level stuff, man.
The question I've ultimately got for you is pretty simple. Why? You guys have a product that you're obviously pretty proud of. Relatively major news blogs have written blog posts about it. Lots of users really like it. So why not take ownership of your product? Why make the title of your website "XBMC Addons for Kodi" when you can call it "TVMC"? Or "TV Addons"? Or literally anything that indicates the site is about what you make, rather than trying to confuse people that the site is about what we make?
I get why you called it XBMChub in the past. At the beginning, you needed to ride our coattails. You needed a way to make people notice you. You created as much confusion as possible, because it got you links.
That doesn't really seem necessary anymore. People know who you are and what you make. You don't need to suck off the XBMC/Kodi teat anymore. And yet for whatever reason, you guys still do. You use that absurd title that says absolutely nothing about what you make. You say that TV Addons is "powered by Kodi" even though not a single Kodi developer also develops for your site. I genuinely have no idea what "powered by Kodi" even means. It's certainly not a phrase explicitly mentioned as OK in our trademark policy. But I guess at some point your attempts at obfuscating get so exhausting that we simply don't know how else to say "please stop trying to pretend to be us."
I genuinely thought you guys were making a serious effort to try to be your own brand without feeling the need to leach off of ours when you choose the TV Addons domain. I thought these guys are really making the effort, since we made it so clear that we absolutely detested the way you were confusing the entire userbase before. But it appears, in reality, that that was not the plan at all. The plan was to continue sowing confusion. The plan was to continue leaching off the name. The plan was to continue literally every practice you could... so long as you stayed within the letter of the of the trademark policy.
I'm honestly pretty curious how much of the TV Addons.... I mean the "XBMC Addons for Kodi" community stands behind the constant effort to pretend to be somebody they aren't. I wonder if all the devs think this is a cool idea, or if it's just a few guys and the rest of the people care more about the addons themselves than the incredible bad will being generated by the confusion created with your website.
Regardless, man, looking at the tvaddons site at the moment is really disheartening to me.
