The fact that a newly-renamed product was previously known by a different name does not necessarily mean that its current iteration is created by a new author / company - e.g., a company that owns / manufactures a product may decide to change its name even without a change of ownership of the product. A lot of trademark doctrine essentially hinges on whether or not there is consumer confusion as to who is the source of the product or service. ![]() of plasticbugs as an author, but rather exploiting the name of the derivative product that plasticbugs created ("Gimpshop").Īnd as to The Winsome Parker Lewis' suggestion of including "formerly known as Gimpshop" in the product title - again, I am not sure that's a good way to go. Holgate, the right of publicity cause of action is not appropriate here - the infringer is not exploiting the name, likeness, etc. posted by plasticbugs to Computers & Internet (26 answers total) 13 users marked this as a favorite Thanks in advance and no, you are not my lawyer. Do I have any grounds for taking the domain or preventing this guy from profiting from my name and work? Now, I'm finally feeling it's time to release a new working version of Gimpshop for OS X Snow Leopard along with the source. I assumed the guy would just give it up as I sadly let the project stagnate, but that hasn't happened. It has been five years, the software has stagnated (due in no small part to my becoming discouraged by this one profiteer who trumped me, stole much of my traffic and bumped my site down to the second result when you search for "Gimpshop"). I questioned his motives and he said he was just a fan and that the site was a "fan-site". I asked that the owner stop hot-linking my files (and draining my bandwidth), so he hosted them somewhere else. Soon, there were donate buttons, my name in the site's title and much more - making it look like my website. ![]() Not more than a few days after the OS X version was released and spread virally, someone who isn't me bought "", put up a site with hot-links to the files on my site and began advertising - LOTS of advertising. I also ruffled some feathers, mainly GIMP's core developers, but that's another story. ![]() I released it as Gimpshop in hopes of giving people a viable, free Photoshop alternative. You may or may not be surprised how much work actually went into it (I honestly don't know how to code). It was mostly just renaming and rearranging menu commands and bundling in Photoshop-like filters. In 2006, I rearranged the popular open source GIMP graphics editor to work and act more like Photoshop.
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