RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

clem57 — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 16:05:03 GMT

Here is the trademark RETROPIE Trademark of Aditya Rawat. Serial Number: 87041177 :: Trademarkia Trademarks. If someone proves this to be false:

First Use Anywhere:8/1/2015First Use In Commerce:12/1/2015

Then trademark was incorrectly filed and someone else can lay claim on that basis. I am not a lawyer, but believe evidence can prove this as invalid. Anyone have it?

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

djfraz — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 14:50:53 GMT

Going by what the guy has said, that he wants to stop people profiting from using retropie as a pirating system, I can understand why he has take out the trademark and having the offending companies stopped. As I know that the general public like to generalize a couple of people using the system for pirate ROMs and take it that the system was designed for this purpose only, just look at the heat Kodi has gotten recently for the same reason.

Although he has gone about it in completely the wrong way. If you want to stop people selling the system with pirate ROMs, contact the project and they can deal with it (at their discretion), or go through the marketplace that the person/company is using (eBay, Amazon, etc) and they can follow up on any issue regarding piracy.

Hopefully the retropie team will have some success in having this dealt with before any major harm to the project happens. I think though that is is a shame that projects who have gained success in a short space of time have to deal with something like this, although I do believe that the GNU licence has their back (although I am not a lawyer and only going off what I know about it, feel free to correct me)

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

mcb1 — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 04:35:16 GMT

Interesting conversation.

While they want ot increase sales of retro games, and a case, etc there is no need to steal the name of an existing system and claim it as theirs.

Hopefully they get what they deserve .

Mark

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

makerguy — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 02:15:14 GMT

Looks like the folks are coming out clean, It looks like what they did what founder should have done long ago.

they do have interesting points to add on the ongoing retropie and online marketplace cannibalization >>https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/59819

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

Jan Cumps — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 19:16:00 GMT

... although they can be disturbing to you - with the trademark issues they are raising - they will not be long-lived though.

None of the businesses that do faul play with open source have a significant life span.

Just like you, they operate in the small geek tech circle, where word goes around quickly (non geeks aren't that interested in retro games)

And in that market, where sympathy plays a role, they won't steal much business.

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

dougw — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 15:36:01 GMT

This ugly nonsense is always nasty and painful.

However cease and desist letters are relatively cheap - they will have a hard time taking it to an actual court case.

The response should be a strongly worded rebuttal, basically telling them to buzz off and stop plagiarizing your copywrite. Unfortunately it will probably need to be crafted by a lawyer. If they want to pursue it, their costs will then escalate well beyond any revenue they might be enjoying. It might be worth obtaining some trademarks of your own as well.

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

e14 Contributor — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 15:03:33 GMT

That sucks, I hope if they're successful in resolving this they can pursue for damages made by the owner of the fake trademark for issuing those take down requests.

RE: RetroPie Victim of 'Stolen Identity'

Jan Cumps — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 14:01:48 GMT

ow [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-83d39de4-363c-4b7c-8a5e-12766abd9a2a/contentimage_5F00_2.png:16:16]

Only lawyers can get rich from this. You could shoot a breach of license case (for the SD card inclusion) and issue a counter-take-down of their product based on that.

That 'll at least take their joy away (and eats away from the money buffer they can put in a lawsuit).