# The trademark issue is pretty cut and dried: a trademark holder must show
due diligence in…

As for linking: you may not remember, but the court case regarding the legal
status of links was a *big* deal, and old media companies are…

* * *

The trademark issue is pretty cut and dried: a trademark holder must show due
diligence in protecting its trademarks or else it loses control of the
trademark permanently; as a result, a trademark holder has every incentive to
send nasty messages to anybody they might have reason to believe might be seen
by future courts as infringing upon their trademark, lest they be suspected of
not protecting it well enough. (Basically, the law incentivizes trademark
holders to be assholes & go overboard, which is why Disney sues day care
centers for having Disney-owned characters on murals.)

As for linking: you may not remember, but the court case regarding the legal
status of links was a *big* deal, and old media companies are likely to still
be pretty sore about it. It was only twenty years ago that the question of
whether or not deep linking was a form of infringement; similar mechanisms
(like the use of frames to wrap ads around other people’s sites) were ruled
against. It doesn’t really matter if the NYT is planning to make a bot: they
didn’t want to give up on suing Google & anybody else who does deep links, and
now that they have to, they have every intention to prevent that verdict from
being generalized to slightly different circumstances.

Furthermore, you can make the argument that use of the API might, in certain
cases, lower the number of ad views they get or screw up their progressive
paywall system. While I’m not convinced that either system is making them bank
in the way that they might hope (and both are easily & regularly bypassed),
they have a financial incentive to label and shun anything that might
conceivably be used to circumvent these mechanisms — particularly if the
product is not commercial.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [August 22,
2016](https://medium.com/p/88adaa107117).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-trademark-issue-is-pretty-cut-
and-dried-a-trademark-holder-must-show-due-diligence-in-88adaa107117)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.