Startups fighting over the word 'zen'

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Startups-are-fighting-over-the-word-zen-5968580.php

by ojbyrne • 12 years ago

46 42 12 years ago

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

In other naming clash news; I've noticed that a bunch of companies have launched things named Atlas recently:

  * hashicorp's application delivery system [1]
  * netflix's telemetry platform [2]
  * oreilly's new learning environment [3]
  * a high-performance and stable proxy for MySQL [4]
  * a fitness tracker [5]
  * of course, facebook's atlas [6]

[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas.html [2] http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli... [3] http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/tags/featured [4] https://github.com/Qihoo360/Atlas [5] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atlas-the-first-fitness-t... [6] http://atlassolutions.com/2014/09/29/meet-the-new-atlas/

All of these are up against some already pretty strong SEO for the keyword too:

https://www.google.com/search?q=atlas

driverdan• 12 years ago

Also https://atlas.torproject.org/

gregoire• 12 years ago

There's also Mapbox's Altas Server: https://www.mapbox.com/enterprise/

snuxoll• 12 years ago

Sorry Zendesk, Novell has you beat by many years for things starting with "Zen".

hyperliner• 12 years ago

Novell? The Chinese beat everybody by about 14 centuries or more!

meepmorp• 12 years ago

But it was Chán till the Japanese iterated on it and disrupted the Mahayana world.

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

"For Zendesk, ideas associated with zen are now deeply ingrained in the company’s culture and branding. The company mascot is a Laughing Buddha, dubbed “The Mentor,” who wears a telephone headset."

They should be very careful doing business in several Buddhist countries with that as their mascot. In a lot of places it would go down about as well as a tech support business called YahwehDesk, promoted with a picture of Jesus in a call center.

photex• 12 years ago

This is my first thought every time I see a Buddha used as a charming icon for something.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

s/ideas associated with zen/tacky cultural affectations/

prawn• 12 years ago

Three men (one New Zealander, two locals) have recently been arrested and face trial in Myanmar after promoting their bar with a poster featuring Buddha with headphones:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/13...

rblion• 12 years ago

Can't even find words for this level of irony.

gohrt2• 12 years ago

"ZenDesk, this is your Moment of Zen"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Daily_Show_recurrin...

spacefight2• 12 years ago

Irony? Absolute trademark stupidity. Unless the other zen* companies are offering a helpdesk software, there should not be ground for a legal dispute.

duffyt• 12 years ago

Personally, when I first heard of Zenpayroll and Zenefits I though they were similar enough services that they might be associated with Zendesk. I think there's definitely possibility of confusion.

http://marklaw.com/trademark-glossary/confuse.htm

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

wmeredith• 12 years ago

Ask any trademark lawyer worth their salt and they'll tell you, "don't put a noun in your company name." That's why you get law firms named Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P. and not ZenLaw, LLC.

bdr• 12 years ago

So it's ok if you have a verb and an adjective first?

percept• 12 years ago

(Followed by a food group.)

spacefight2• 12 years ago

I was evaluating Zendesk and I already signed up for zopim.

I am going to ditch both.

nwatson• 12 years ago

Zenprise founded 2003 acquired by Citrix 2013, product now called XenMobile.

mkehrt2• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks naming your company after a religion is a little unpleasant?

ertdfgcb• 12 years ago

To be fair, Zen is much less a religion than Christianity, some would even call it a philosophy.

zedmonkey2• 12 years ago

This meme that Zen is a philosophy is incredibly unfair / misguided. It's a religion. It's a branch of Mahayana Buddhism, it's practised as a religion, in some regions it still has the aspects of Guru and Deity worship that have been inherited from the larger schools. The full name of the religion is Zen Buddhism.

As someone who has been involved with the religion and with Japanese friends who are also a part of it, it's incredibly belittling when this idea gets spread around. It's only in the West that all of the cultural and religious background has been stripped out and turned into a marketing device.

I often joke that if Buddhism had more extremist members we'd have a lot more holy wars than anyone else. Dressed up Buddhas, Zen stapled onto every two bit startup and cheap product, blogs about consumerist driven minimalism selling themselves as "Zen". It really is ridiculous. What is being done here is just as offensive to eastern cultures as if an East Asian startup branded itself using Christian or Islamic imagery or terms, citing that it's all just "philosophy".

Anyone stealing these terms and imagery really should read some of the critiques of Western misappropriation of Eastern "Spirituality" like "The Scientific Buddha" or "Selling Spirituality". Or even just take five minutes to consider the countries and contexts they might want to operate in as they grow.

chetanv• 12 years ago

I am not aware if its really a religion. Many people use the word to mean "calmness/meditation".

The etymological roots go to Sanskrit "Dhyan" -> Chinese "Chan" -> Japanese "Zen"

https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+zen&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

I suspect that these folk would be very surprised to learn that it is not, as they have been practicing it as one for a long time now:

http://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/eng/library/glossary/individ...

Although there is good reason to speak of the "Zen school" as a distinct branch of the Buddhist tradition of Japan, there has never been any organized social or institutional entity bearing that name. At present, there are twenty-two comprehensive religious corporations (hōkatsu shūkyō hōjin 包括宗教法人) registered with the Japanese government that are recognized as belonging to the Zen tradition (Zenkei 禪系). These include: the Soto School (Sōtōshū 曹洞宗); fifteen separate corporations that identify themselves as branches (ha 派) of the Rinzai lineage (Rinzaishū 臨濟宗); the Ōbaku School (Ōbakushū 黃檗宗); and five small corporations that have splintered off from the Soto and Rinzai organizations. Each of the twenty-two Zen denominations has a number of temples affiliated with it, ranging from 14,664 in the Soto School to 3,389 in the Myōshinji branch of the Rinzai lineage (Rinzaishū Myōshinjiha 臨濟宗妙心寺派), 455 in the Ōbaku School, a few hundred in the smaller Rinzai denominations, and just a handful in the smallest of the corporations (all data from Bunkachō 文化廳, ed., Shūkyō nenkan 宗教年鑑, 2003 Edition).

One thing that clergy affiliated with all the Zen denominations in Japan hold in common is the belief in a Zen lineage (Zenshū 禪宗) of dharma transmission said to have been founded by the Buddha Shakamuni, established in China by the Indian monk Bodaidaruma, and subsequently transmitted to Japan by numerous Japanese and Chinese monks. During the Kamakura period (1185-1333) and the two decades immediately following, by one account, some twenty-four separate branches (ryūha 流派) of the Zen lineage were established in Japan. By another reckoning, there were forty–six individual transmissions of the Zen dharma to Japan, beginning with Myōan Eisai 明庵榮西 (1141-1215) in 1191 and extending down to the Chinese monks Ingen (C. Yinyuan 隱元,1592–1673) and Shinetsu (C. Xinyue 心越, 1639–1696), who came to Japan in 1654 and 1677, respectively, and established the so-called Ōbaku lineage (Ōbakushū 黃檗宗). At present, however, all Zen clergy trace their own lineages of dharma inheritance back to China through only two men: (1) Nanpo Jōmyō 南浦紹明 (1235-1308), a.k.a. Daiō Kokushi, founder of the Daiō branch (Daiōha 大應派) of Rinzai Zen; and (2) Dōgen Kigen 道元希玄 (1200-1253), founder of the Dōgen branch (Dōgenha 道元派) of Soto Zen. All the other branches of the Zen lineage that flourished in the past are said to have died out, having failed at some point to produce any more dharma heirs.

Most of the Zen denominations in Japan operate training monasteries in which the bureaucratic structures, ritual calendars, and modes of practice are modeled after those found in the leading Buddhist monasteries of Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1280-1368) dynasty China. Those institutional forms were first imported into Japan in the Kamakura period, chiefly (but not exclusively) by the same monks who transmitted the Zen lineage. Texts containing the religious lore of the Zen lineage in China - genealogies of dharma transmission, biographies of Zen masters, records of their discourses, and koan collections - were also brought to Japan at that time, and have been handed down to the present within the various denominations as the common heritage of the Zen school.

grellas• 12 years ago

Even as a lawyer, one becomes weary after a time in seeing how people use the law to abuse others.

The key to this sort of trademark claim is likelihood of confusion or perhaps implied endorsement in having a common-sounding name. Where it is obvious that two companies are in entirely unrelated fields, then the holder of the mark who wants to shut others down had better have a very strong mark such that any use by others of something that sounds similar implies affiliation or endorsement.

There is no way that this is the case with the "zen" prefix.

Even on a personal level, I represented companies known as Zentek Strategy and Zentek Technology, the latter of which became a $2B market cap company before having issues in 2008. We filed and got a registered trademark for "Zentek" and held this from about 1990 through 2008 when the company had some problems and shut its operations. The mark that we registered was not even in Class 9 (where most tech companies file for marks) but in another class because there was already another long-established "zentek" company that held a registered mark in Class 9.

So, wow, the claimant here says, in effect, "we have been using 'zen' since 2007 and so we have a right to claim this exclusively as our own." And it then proceeds to file formal proceedings against all sort of other companies to force them to spend large sums of money or else give up using their marks that share only a common prefix.

Call it what you will. I call this abuse, pure and simple. I can only hope that the people doing this take pride in their coolness as zen proponents even as display the height of arrogance in how they choose to act.

marincounty• 12 years ago

You definetly have a book in you on this topic alone. There are a lot of people with meager funds who can't afford to trademark their name, or business--and get bullied. I would like to see every native born citizen given one free shot at a trademark. After, that one shot; the price would skyrocket so companies would have to think twice about--3 dozen trademarks.

cbhl• 12 years ago

What stops $first_employer from making $file_trademark_on_behalf_of_company a condition of employment?

thebear• 12 years ago

I obtained the trademark for my company name in 2013, and the total cost was $275. I did it all online and without a lawyer.

ohashi• 12 years ago

What could be done to the abusers if someone actually ponied up the cash?

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Mumon said, 'Those who cling onto words are fools who believe that they can catch the moon with a stick or can scratch their itchy foot through a leather shoe.'

http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm If this is new to you, I recommend starting out with #29.

suzyperplexus• 12 years ago

It surprises me that the company is moving forward with this, when they're so known for being cool in other areas like community programs. http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/02/28/twitter-tax-break-be...

It just seems like they're so clearly the most well known "Zen" brand out there. And if this whole thing is about branding, then why not focus on the defensibility of the product rather than the name? Am I being naive here?

kragen• 12 years ago

This seems like an open threat against Zen Buddhism — Zendesk is trying to gain ownership of the word "Zen". I wonder if we could get some abbots of monasteries to file a claim with the USPTO to revoke Zendesk's trademark?

steven2012• 12 years ago

We use Zendesk at work, and when I saw articles with Zenpayroll in it, I honestly thought it was associated with Zendesk. I'm not sure if that's enough of a bar to allow a lawsuit though, but it is a bit confusing, especially since they both deal with back office SaaS.

giarc• 12 years ago

bizarre compound words (Pinterest) have proliferated.

I actually think Pinterest is one of the greater names of recent. You can easily discern that the site is about "interests" and then when you learn about "pinning" items, the name becomes obvious.

Startups fighting over the word 'zen'

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