"Kanboards.com" is not offering Kanboard

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It looks like there is a company offering Kanban boards under the name “Kanboards”: https://kanboards.com/ They do not seem to offer Kanboard hosting but use the Kanboards name for their own software as far as I can see. Seems they came out of submarine mode in April.

They are a US company so I guess if Kanboard is a trademark of Frédéric Guillot it would probably be necessary to ask them to stop using the name now. Otherwise at some point they will be entitled to use it officially and Frédéric will lose the name (I’m not a lawyer but that’s how I thought US trademark law worked, all about trademark defense).

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USPTO - is the place to start. This is a great tool that we use a lot. Many thanks for making it available. People should NOT be making money off it without the creator’s permission.

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As far as I can see from outside, this person is not offering Kanboard hosting but their own product that they call Kanboards. That’s why I brought it up, since tolerating this might mean Frédéric loses the rights to the name in the future.

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That seems to be a Kanboard hosting offering. They have the same features list and similar wording as the Kanboard documentation.

There is nothing that prevent people to do this because Kanboard uses a permissive license.

However, I should register the trademark to protect the name (at least in the US).

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You are right, it is is Kanboard after all (with a custom theme and some plugins). I signed up for a free account to see.

At first I thought they had created their own Kanban system because the feature list has some outlandish stuff like AI estimation support. It seems they have closed/deleted their Facebook and Twitter accounts so maybe this isn’t going to stay. But protecting the name in the US would probably still be useful :+1:

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Just for the records, I own the german domain “kanboard.de” but there is no content on it :wink: