Hello Steemians!
We have previously mentioned and talked shortly about the legal twist we have been in since last fall. If you have not read up on that you can check out our former updates, but here is a short recap:
- We trademark our brand and name, “Deegram”, with patent authorities
- It gets approved
- Instagram LLC sics lawyers our way, tell us to rebrand immediately in a “cease & desist” letter
- We say no
- They ask how “strong our no” is
- We say a no is a no
- They file a case against us with the patent authorities, and we send statements and defend ourselves back and forth
So you are all up to date, and the final statements are currently being reviewed and treated by the patent authorities. And that, until recently, was all there was to it.
But then…
Suddenly the lawyers made contact again. We don’t know why it happened now, perhaps they are realizing we are in a good position to win the case, or perhaps it’s just random. We don’t know for sure.
We’ll try to make this lawyer talk a bit folksier to summarize:
“So hey guys, remember how we tried to revoke your trademark? Well, on behalf of Instagram LLC. and Facebook Inc., we’re here to tell you that we’re going to ban you from social media. If you somehow use “INSTA” or “GRAM” in your mark, we’re going to close your page”
So now our Facebook and Instagram pages are “subject to disabling in accordance with the relevant policies and terms of service”, with no further details of when this might happen, or if there is any way we can modify our pages to comply with their requirements.
The way it seems is that they may be realizing their case against us is not very good, so they use their right as a platform provider to use censorship to silence us. Even though we have every lawful right to be named Deegram and use our own trademark
How do we handle this?
As no demands or details are enlisted in how to comply or when this closing is going to take place, it all seems like an attempt at forcing our hand to comply with their initial demands even if patent authorities side with us.
This is damaging for a startup and early-stage product. Between the pages in question we have over 500 followers, mostly non-Steem followers that we have worked to recruit and onboard to Steem. Now we might be losing our channel of communication with this community. Due to this, we have decided to comply “in accordance with the relevant policies and terms of service”, and we will no longer use or contain reference to “INSTA” or “GRAM” in our name.
Presenting Deegrm
We are renaming and rebranding to Deegrm, the decentralized grm, effective immediately.
In that regard we are now looking to change our logo, and we currently have a draft for our new logo that we would like to share with you.
Thank you for reading our update and your continued support, we would as always love to receive your feedback and thoughts on the work we do.
Best regards,
The Deegrm team
Sounds like a good PR story you could use to your best advantage.
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Definitely something we are looking to do about this. Have to turn it to the best of our advantage!
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Facebook banned the entire Crypto industry and Google joined in! The crypto markets dropped 53% in a week! Join @jbpliberty in the Class Action against them. www.jpbliberty.com
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Should've just changed the A into Æ. :D
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Deegräm
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Yeah that was my first choice but figured as they're Norwegian. :D
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I thinks it's better that way, the Finnish layout sounds so dank... I mean, dänk :D
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Swedish*
XD
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No samat ääkköset ja öökkösethän noissa on, haha.
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ah, I didn't realise that
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Phonetically unchanged, clever @acidyo. Who knows what the future brings?
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meaning you need to change ur @deegramofficial to @deegrmofficial too =) ... but like what @fredrikaa said ... its one heck of a story to take advantage off.
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Yeah for sure. We'll make the best of the situation, while awaiting the final verdict from the patent authorities on our trademark.
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Sounds like big drama to me!
!dramatoken
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DRAMATIC ERROR WHILE PARSING DRAMATIC ERROR
To view or trade
DRAMA
go to steem-engine.com.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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Jajaja
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Good for you! Well handled, a problem that you can't fix (immediately) needs to be turned around. Thanks for creating this dapp, I will definitely use it!
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Thank you @pele23! We do our best to bring another great dapp to Steem!
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Interesting times
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You giveway to fb’s term, start onboarding more steemians from facebook now, that is too furthef annoy zuck!💪
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You know what... I WAS STOP USE FACEBOOK LONG TIME, so if you can make same. And lets start use new things. I know all new is first time hard to use, but when we all start come out from this old and week pages , we get more strong in long run. And this Facebook have no money then to fight for foolish systems what they bild up there.
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This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News in 10 posts - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.
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This is brilliant. I wouldn't worry too much about the Facebook and Instagram accounts, it's really difficult to get some actual traction from a 500 person community there. This rename move anyway is great in terms of publicity and you should try to make as much out of that as possible.
In a grander scheme of things it's interesting to see how vigorously Instagram / Facebook are trying to protect themselves from decentralized alternatives. Maybe because they have something in the making themselves, but maybe it's also because they actually feel threatened by the web 3.0...
Anyway, great work, keep it up!
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Thank you for your comment, and the intensity of how they pursue competition and startups is something that really went further than we expected.
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Congratulations @deegramofficial! You received a personal award!
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As a rival businesses, it is not in their interest to host the page you are advertising from. Would you use your resources to help a direct competitor? It does not surprise me in the least that they would block your pages. Utilize other mediums - youtube, telegram, discord, blogs, magazines, wikis, etc.
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Thank you for your response @trefrog, and we see your point! We believe it's a dangerous path to go down if we let platform providers pick and choose which information and data that is allowed to share.
If a page or information shared is unlawful we can understand Facebook's desire to maintain control and remove or block content. However, at some point we will be crossing a dangerous line that lets platform providers apply sensorship.
We believe that as long as we are in compliance with national law and using our legally owned trademark, that we should also be free to represent our product and our work in social media.
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Yep
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