I think we all see Waffle House's side of this, but there is a best, better, and worst way to engage a customer. A cease and desist is the worst, it's taking something which could have been handled by PR, to a legal threat. Regardless of Waffle House's legal rights, which they do have, from a public perception and way to run a company it was not the right approach. They should have embraced this guy and his website, engage him, and through that channel let him know "hey, you can't use our trademarks, etc. so you'll need to rebrand, but we love what you're doing and want to help."
Vastly different approach with a much better upswing.
The C&D isn't for the customers, it's for Waffle House. Apprising a party of their infringement and putting them on notice is a crucial procedural step for potential litigation.
>They should have embraced this guy and his website, engage him, and through that channel let him know "hey, you can't use our trademarks, etc. so you'll need to rebrand, but we love what you're doing and want to help."
I don't mean this cynically or rhetorically, but: why? I get that this is a fun and humorous side project for the creator, but I don't see any real upside for Waffle House in supporting it. If Waffle House wanted to lean into the proxy-for-FEMA marketing angle, it'd be much better off doing it in-house, where it'd have complete creative control. More likely, Waffle House marketing strategists crunched the numbers and are understandably hesitant to expand branding based on national disasters and the woeful state of government response infrastructure.
We do this every year when Nintendo sends an icy C&D to some quirky project built on its IP. Techies rend their garments about the deplorable state of IP law, and forecast imminent fallout from all the "bad PR" and "missed opportunities," as if there's a vast, highly sensitive market segment of temporarily aggrieved nerds that has somehow gone unaccounted for in its sprawling global marketing strategy. "I'll never buy a Nintendo product again!" says the 42-year-old Senior Software Engineer with 312 unplayed games in his Steam library, and the money-printing machine continues to hum unabated.
I think it's like 'needs work' in a pull request. What one person sees as just honest feedback another sees as starting a fight that didn't need to be one. And a lot of tech people have learned to hit back when they think they're being bullied. Because bullies don't stop until they're bleeding in front of witnesses. Let's get this over now instead of dragging it out.
You've escalated where threat of escalation should have sufficed. Hey we need you to change your site to make it obvious this is a fan site and not ours. Otherwise we'll have to send a properly lawyery letter in a few weeks if we don't hear back from you about a plan.
One of these throws a person's life into utter chaos. The other gives them time to be a grownup about it.
From a lawyer perspective though, a cease & desist is a threat of escalation.
A lawsuit is the escalation. A cease and desist is a strongly worded letter that isn't really legally binding or anything.
The issue here is just impedance mismatch on the language. The legal department is used to doing things in legal terms, and probably sends out like a lot of cease and desists. And most of the targets of those also have lawyers who are speaking the same language, so it works. Just when it's a random individual getting the letter, there's a lot more confusion.
They might not want to help. They could host this data themselves, they obviously already have the data, but instead they removed the way it could be scraped. The connotations here may not be perceived as purely positive. For example, it could be perceived as putting extra stress on Waffle House employees.
We run a search and chat company and felt particularly compelled to send a demo to a customer using a competitor's API. The search was so poor and slow, we saw it as an easy lay up.
Our mistake was posting it all over X and LinkedIn. We got hit with a cease and desist so fast.
Marked as wrong timing in the CRM and moved on!
How can you assert what is the right approach in this situation? What if they don't love what he's doing?
If this is about PR, as one data point, I don't think any differently of anyone involved. I wouldn't if Waffle House engaged him either.
What gives you the impression that WH loves what he was doing? The company has never embraced its utility as a disaster index.
That “want to help” phrase implies a level of support that they might not have resources to give.