Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How much "justice" can Elastic afford?

A few people above have said that Elastic is worth $10-14 billion. This isn't a one-man OSS project we're talking about.

Valuation and available Cash are very different.

On the other hand, as a result there are probably tens of millions to be made off a successful suit.

Works on Contingency? No. Money Down! - L. Hutz

Trademark law is complicated enough that I can imagine several scenarios where owning "Elastic" does not allow you to prescribe Amazon's use of "Elasticsearch Service", or at least where there's enough of a question of law as to allow the matter to proceed to rather expensive litigation.

Also:

>Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK.

This and several other sentences alleging illegal behavior on the part of Amazon seem suspicious to me. When I hear someone say that they had to sue another company, but provide no further details of the suit, then I can only assume that their lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge. Otherwise, they'd talk about the litigation - there is no legal condition I could think of where you would be allowed to disclose the existence of a lawsuit and make general allegations about a company, but not disclose the existence of at least a settlement agreement, if not a legal judgment.

Does anyone know if Elastic's Amazon lawsuit went anywhere?

It seems to me (not a lawyer) that “Amazon Elastic Search Service” would be OK in a way that “Amazon Elasticsearch Service” would not.

(AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)

I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking the product/service is from the trademark holder when it actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me.

FTA: When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK.

It does seem tricky. On on hand, they want to stop AWS using "Elasticsearch" in a product name because it isn't in partnership with Elastic co., but on the other hand AWS's product really does contain Elasticsearch, which is why they are changing their license. If AWS had a product called "Elasticsearch Service" which didn't contain Elasticsearch, then it would be pretty clear cut as that would be very confusing, but a product called "Elasticsearch Service" that really does contain "Elasticsearch" seems pretty self-explanatory.

Does it really contain ElasticSearch? It is a fork right, so can you still call it ElasticSearch? I don't think you should be able to use the name in this case, and you definitely can't say you are "partnered" with a company when you most definitely aren't.

In general, yes, it can be tricky to determine what will and won't be confusing to people, since different people see things differently.

In this specific case, it doesn't seem tricky to me. When you have concrete examples of people getting confused, no speculation is needed.

But what are they confused over? "Amazon RDS for SQL Server" seems no more and no less confusing to me than "Amazon Elasticsearch Service".

As a user, I don't care in the least about the business relationship behind the product. I care about whether Amazon RDS works like SQL Server and whether Amazon Elasticsearch Service works like Elasticsearch. What financial arrangements, if any, are behind the scenes are not a concern to users.

I think the original link and the CTO disagrees with what "colloboration" means.

From Amazon's perspective, if they contributed a single fix, or asked a single question of ElasticSearch on the issue tracker, then this is a product born from colloboration.

It's difficult to think anyone is going to think that Amazon ElasticSearch is by anyone other than Amazon.

What else would you call the Amazon Elasticsearch Service?

Isn't that just Nominative fair use: referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark?

Especially when it launched and there wasn't a fork.

Is it really so easy?

Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you probably can also name it like that?