Comodo has filed for express abandonment of LetsEncrypt trademark applications

https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anything-and-everything/trademark-registration-t115968.0.html;msg837505#msg837505

by FredericJ • 10 years ago

302 93 10 years ago

forums.comodo.com

ocdtrekkie• 10 years ago

It's amazing how a bit of bad press can expedite such matters. :) Nice try, Comodo, better luck next time.

nacs• 10 years ago

"A bit" is a bit of an understatement. The Comodo issue was one of the most upvoted on both HN and Reddit.

People immediately realized how much of a terrible company Comodo is and the negative feedback had to have poured in.

criddell• 10 years ago

Even if you forgive them for this, there's plenty of other reasons to dislike Comodo.

Rantenki• 10 years ago

There: http://www.myce.com/news/comodo-ships-ad-injecting-https-int... Sure: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2623829/authentication/weak... Are: http://dottech.org/10032/paying-a-price-to-use-free-software...

AdmiralAsshat• 10 years ago

Evidently the company realized they were fighting a losing battle, particularly after the CEO's disastrous response:

https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anyth...

ars• 10 years ago

I give him credit for actually talking publicly with people.

Most CEO's hide behind the PR department, or speak only one-way, without replies.

kstrauser• 10 years ago

I'm loathe to give him credit for publicly saying the most ridiculous things imaginable from one in his position.

woodman5• 10 years ago

Most CEO's hide...

As they should when they're so divorced from reality that they provide the justifications that this guy has. Open dialog is nice, but it doesn't mean much when the underlying message is that of hostility.

Joeri• 10 years ago

Yes, but his reply reminded me of the saying 'it is better to keep quiet and be thought a fool, than speak and remove all doubt'.

KB1JWQ• 10 years ago

Sure, but most CEO's tend to determine exactly what their public-facing position IS before speaking. In this case he looks the fool as they're walking back his statements.

jordigh• 10 years ago

"Intellectual copyrights", wtf is that?

cbd19842• 10 years ago

"Intellectual copyrights", wtf is that?

Either someone who doesn't know the law trying to look smart, or someone who does know the law trying to bullshit their way into being able to own more than the union of copyright law, patent law, and trademark law actually allow them to own. Believe it or not, the law doesn't recognize "It's mine because I scream loudly enough" as a valid concept.

paulftw2• 10 years ago

One forum post, nine different sentences saying the same thing: "Comodo invented 90 day free certificate".

To me this sounds quite similar to the ownership of the rectangle with rounded corners (I am actually not sure whose side I'm on in either dispute).

amluto• 10 years ago

"Comodo invented 90 day free certificate"

It's even sillier than that. Comodo has long offered a 90 day free trial cert. You have to pay to renew.

Let's Encrypt gives a 90 day free cert that's freely renewable as many times as you want along with an API to renew it. These aren't the same business models at all.

dimdimdim• 10 years ago

Shows how most CEOs of even large companies are human like everyone else, not the "super mature", "super calculated", "super intelligent" begins they are made out to be. It's also important to note the arrogance - invented the 90 day trial :D

TruthAndDare• 10 years ago

Shows how most CEOs of even large companies are human like everyone else

Um, it doesn't really say anything about most CEOs, does it?

Actually, I think it shows how this guy is different from others, because he seems more nutty than most people.

fapjacks2• 10 years ago

Tangential, but what in the hell is with the whole thing where company execs refuse to use "I" in a sentence? Read anything typed up by some founder or something, and you see sentence after sentence deliberately omitting self-reference. Here specifically: "If they have right to it then more than happy to comply"... If they have right to it then I am/we are more than happy to comply. Anytime someone posts email correspondence on HN, it's inevitably a conversation devoid of self-referential terminology, even in totally innocuous sentences. "More than happy to X. Concerned about the thing with Y. Call this afternoon after meeting with Z." It's totally annoying.

woodman5• 10 years ago

The use of "I" vs "we" has been studied by a lot of people in a lot of different contexts, and intelligent people have arrived at very different conclusions. So I have no idea what a complete lack of attribution means, but I'm leaning towards it being an extreme version of "we". I believe to be an avoidance of personal responsibility and a hamfisted attempt at emotional manipulation, because it has absolutely no influence over logically guided decision making.

x0x0• 10 years ago

The name Melih sounds Turkish maybe? I'm too lazy to look. But that's a characteristic esl quirk...

spb• 10 years ago

I remember reading an article a while back (couldn't find it through Google) that talked about how people with abusive tendencies (which this kind of tortured diatribe seems adjacent to) have an accompanying tendency to psychologically distance themselves from their actions by avoiding first-person constructions, eg. "and then it happened" instead of "and then I did it".

That being said, it sounds like the cause of the omissions of just the words of the first-person constructions this post uses is more likely to be rooted in English being Melih's second language.

ci5er• 10 years ago

I know that after I'd spent several years working in Japan and then returned to the United States, both my written and spoken language (English, in this case) had a marked (and remarked upon) paucity of self-referential pronouns.

I'm guessing, in this case, that this is just an ESL thing.

orf• 10 years ago

That whole thread is worth a read. Here is a global forum moderator slating the CEO: https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anyth...

kordless• 10 years ago

Trying to piggy back on our business model and copying our model of giving certificates for 90 days for free is not ethical.

I can't even imagine what he was thinking when he was saying this. Well, I can imagine dissonance, but not on the level from where this comes. It's literally insane, given it's business, and software business at that.

spyder• 10 years ago

"trying to get your loyal but "blind" followers to bully another enterprise via their tweets. It won't work!"

Looks like it works. :D

woodman5• 10 years ago

"You have the power Mike Please make it stop"

-- Paul Christoforo, while being crushed by the internet hate machine.

AdamGibbins• 10 years ago

Great to see a resolution to this issue, but this doesn't change the huge distrust in the organisation I've now gained. I won't be for the foreseeable future be buying any Comodo service again. They're clearly horribly misaligned with my values.

ovt• 10 years ago

Glad they gave up, but calling it collaboration and speaking of thanking is silly bullshit.

josephb• 10 years ago

Unless we see a statement from ISRG or LetsEncrypt, I'm going to assume "collaboration" means capitulation in the face of Internet pitchforks :)

techload• 10 years ago

Exactly what I thought.

jtokoph• 10 years ago

Too late for me. Already renewed my expiring certs elsewhere yesterday.

oolongCat• 10 years ago

I wonder if several hundred people like youself had anything to do with their "express" abandonment.

diegorbaquero• 10 years ago

Still, will never buy from them again.

tommoor• 10 years ago

Yup, that reply from the CEO alone is enough for me to never want to buy a cert from Comodo again.

nneonneo• 10 years ago

In the original Comodo forum thread about this issue (where the CEO made some claims about owning the 90-day certificate) there is this new response from a staff member (https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anyth...):

With LE now being an operational business, we were never going to take the these trademark applications any further. Josh posted a link to the application and as of February 8th it was already in a state where it will lapse.
Josh was wrong when he said we’d “refused to abandon our applications”. We just hadn’t told LE we would leave them to lapse.
We have now communicated this to LE.

On LE's blog post, they mention that they have repeatedly asked Comodo to abandon the applications since March 2016. If Comodo was going to let the applications lapse as they claim, why not communicate this at the earliest opportunity?

To me this is a dodgy answer at best. I am not so familiar with trademark law, but I don't believe that an application "being in a state where it will lapse" is in any way disarmed - it is my impression that Comodo could simply have opted to continue the process, but is pretending that they wouldn't have in order to avoid bad press.

hosh5• 10 years ago

How is it that the Comodo CEO kept assuming Let's Encrypt and ISRG is a business, when it isn't? It's like he's fixated on that assumption and is dragging everyone else into it.

Further, the last time I read through things about trademarks, my understanding is that they don't work the way some of the people posting say it does. Trademarks are influenced by whether it is a distinguishing mark or not. You can lose trademark protection if it comes into common use. Once registered, you have to keep defending it as a distinguishing mark. So I'm not sure where the "paralegal" in that forum thread is coming up with the argument that it somehow works like a "first-to-file" -- the person who possesses the paperwork possesses the right.

Maybe my understanding is incorrect. If it isn't off though, I can see their lawyers saying, Comodo really doesn't have much of a case (but it'd still eat up a lot of time and resources a small non-profit won't have).

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

The paralegal in that forum thread is also talking about copyright -- and claims some knowledge about it. Yet this issue centers around trademarks, which are very different from copyrights.

MaulingMonkey2• 10 years ago

If Comodo was going to let the applications lapse as they claim, why not communicate this at the earliest opportunity?

Poor internal communication between the people talking with Comodo and the decisionmakers? Not wanting to give the time of day to the competition, lest they avoiding wasting their time and resources? Deferring committing to the decision until the last moment, in case they change their mind? I can buy it.

it is my impression that Comodo could simply have opted to continue the process, but is pretending that they wouldn't have in order to avoid bad press.

Based on my (non-lawyer) understanding, a trademark application sounds very much like "not a trademark", and an application that Comodo would eventually lose thanks to clear and conflicting objections from the people actually using the term. I don't think they could've continued indefinitely. I think they would have eventually dropped the process, if only through inaction by allowing the application to expire. I can buy that they were at the point where they were planning internally to drop the process.

Not out of any noble reasons, mind you - they'd have dropped it earlier, I think, if those were the cause. Filing in the first place may have been an act of bad faith. It's just not in Comodo's best interests to not fight a loosing battle to the point that it looses them the war, so to speak. Although it might be a bit late for that.

davidgerard2• 10 years ago

We are switching our Comodo certs over to Let's Encrypt because certain old Android versions we have to support work with LE certs but not with Comodo. Particularly important for APIs.

The 90 day expiry is a bit of a faff, but we've mostly automated it using acme.sh and automated DNS edits, and now we just need load balancer access (we just moved to new hosts). LE is a godsend and fully up to commercial use in our experience.

After this, there is no way on earth we're giving Comodo money again. I would rather pay Thawte than these bozos.

technion3• 10 years ago

I've dealt with this issue for years.

Comodo certs have two possible chains. If you want to be supported by older Android (and older iOS) devices, you needed to configure your server to hand out the longer of the chains. When you buy a cert, this is not the chain they will recommend.

This is easy under Linux if you can find the right certs, a huge PITA if you're on IIS.

They do an incredibly poor job of documenting this or informing their support on how to address it.

davidgerard2• 10 years ago

We switched to Let's Encrypt literally because of this, so that's a direct penalty for their stupidity on this one ;-)

Do you know a writeup anywhere of the cert chain issue? (I ask for idle amusement, no way we're going back to them.)

Oh, and when I say "fully up to commercial use", we plan to use LE certs for our dev instances too (so we're SSL at all stages of development).

skywhopper• 10 years ago

Alas, it's too late to save the business they lost forever from my company and others who switched our business to another provider literally yesterday. Thanks Comodo, for letting us know you are not a company we wish to do business with.

technion3• 10 years ago

It's a statement made by what appears to be a new employee, who earlier on in that thread appeared to contradict their CEO.

Melih's arguing on that thread has reached the level of trollbait.

ShakataGaNai• 10 years ago

thank the Let's Encrypt team for helping to bring it to a resolution.

Translation: Thank you LE team for sending the seething rage of internet masses after us. We surrender.

tetrep• 10 years ago

Why do I see this post as "[flagged]"?

admksx45v65uqpw• 10 years ago

I was wondering this too, seems to have been removed though.

woodman5• 10 years ago

This happened on the other link to their message board, and it doesn't surprise me - the CEO has plopped himself in the middle of a very charged issue, making it difficult to discuss the issue without it getting personal. HN is great, due in large part to the moderators knowing what they're doing, but a little more transparency on flagging would be nice (like @dang's unlink and retitle messages). This sort of thing is only going to become more important as information manipulation in old media becomes less effective on people who form their opinions in places like this.

ausjke• 10 years ago

Never used Comodo, and never will.

Beside abusing the legal system, there is something else called right and wrong by common sense. A CEO does not get that really should try a different job.

pmontra• 10 years ago

A wise decision to limit losses and a face saving statement. They shouldn't have started this, hopefully a lesson for other companies.

dsr12• 10 years ago

Let's Encryption updated their blog post:

"Update, June 24 2016

We have confirmed that Comodo submitted Requests for Express Abandonment for all three trademark registration applications in question. We’re happy to see this positive step towards resolution, and will continue to monitor the requests as they make their way through the system.

We’d like to thank our community for their support."

viraptor• 10 years ago

I'll never be sure if this is true, but it will be in my memory... User robinalden is the CTO, who I tweeted ~2h before the response was posted (https://twitter.com/viraptor/status/746138644537237504). Given that he only posted 13 times on those forums, I hope I actually caused him to ask Melih what he's doing :)

stanislavb• 10 years ago

HackerNews has won!

nojvek• 10 years ago

not really, hn still uses certs from comodo. cloudflare still uses certs from comodo. cloudflare and hn dropping comodo would have been close to a win

ComodoHacker• 10 years ago

OK, I won't change my nick to ComodoPhacker this time as I planned to.

Does anyone know a good free alternative to their Comodo Internet Security product? I know there are plenty of free AV products, but I also use its firewall and HIPS features, especially detailed logging.

56k• 10 years ago

"the trademark issue is now resolved", amazing.

They clearly wanted to put them out of business because they see them as a competitor!

Comodo has filed for express abandonment of LetsEncrypt trademark applications

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