People who invested in the insane attempt to trademark-troll the term "magic link," which drove this person out of business:<p>* Tiger Global<p>* Northzone<p>* Lightspeed Ventures<p>* SV Angel<p>* Social Capital<p>* Balaji Srinivasan<p>* Ryan Hoover<p>* Alexis Ohanian<p>* Naval Ravikant<p>Just remember, these are supposed to be sophisticated investors who have technical skills and do due diligence... And you're supposed to see their names on a deal and go, "oh, well, if they invested, there must be something of value here!" Yeah, no. They are literally shareholders in an attempt to trademark-troll into taking ownership over a very basic form of user authentication. So pathetic.
The author <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=protoduction" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=protoduction</a> wrote this:<p>Half a year back or so I built a mini SaaS product that failed, now I'm in the process of open sourcing it so that everybody can freely host it for themselves. Here's the project homepage <a href="https://magiclogin.net" rel="nofollow">https://magiclogin.net</a>, it was/is transactional e-mails and e-mail authentication as a service.
Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself.
I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..
I urge the founder to reconsider. A strongly worded letter is common and is usually far more bark than bite.<p>Has the OP considered consulting with a lawyer? I'm sure there are better alternatives than shutting the whole thing down.
> We never charged anybody or collected payment details for our service.<p>Browses to pricing tab ...<p><i>Fair, low pricing<p>No dark patterns here, you simply pay for what you use with a lower limit.
And still it's cheaper than the competition.</i>
That's a neat idea. Couldn't they just rename the service? Seems like they've been waiting for an opportunity to pull the plug. Or maybe I'm misreading it.