Is there trademark restriction on use of "pet check"?

[kmcurry]

Lots of name collision with established companies: https://www.google.com/search?q=pet+check

[VACoder]

I think Bret was using that as a placeholder only for dev work. The actual site name is going to take some mulling. I don't know enough about the law to know whether petcheck.com would come after us for using pet-check in a development environment. Is that an issue to address right now or can it wait?

Richard Ruth

MCTS SharePoint ® 2010, Application Development

MCTS SharePoint ® 2010, Configuration

CompTIA Security+

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 10:05 AM, Kevin Curry notifications@github.comwrote:

Lots of name collision with established companies: https://www.google.com/search?q=pet+check

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/c4hrva/pet-check/issues/4 .

[qwo]

I think Yip is the suggested codename (even though it collides with a Brazilian telecom company)

The theme is animals & plans and the ability to check/review/lookup relevant information to make a decision.

-checkspot -animalalert (like ambertalert) --animalert (which reads like "Animal Alert" and "Am I Alert?) -Yip

I think the feel and direction of your intention Richard should help decide the name.

There are civic hacking projects for urban blight that they post the 'ugly' place up and shame them until it fixes.

Do you want to just inform users? Its entirely up to you what your set and feels with it.

I'm always for 'strongly informing'

[VACoder]

Good questions and comments Stanley. The references to the urban blight is an interesting one as there are parallels there. I can see some definite possibilities for extending the initial concept so yeah...good stuff! I don't really want this to become a tool to shame non-compliant breeders with. There are plenty of groups that have been using that strategy for years and the result has been mixed. Public awareness has been raised some but animals still endure considerable suffering because there is no (as in almost zero) incentive for non-compliant licensees to change their business practices. They can continue to sell to pet stores and directly to consumers despite an abysmal inspection history that would send most consumers running. Currently the ASPCA has a site that does exactly what the urban blight sites are doing. You can look up a breeder and if there is an image available you can see a picture of the conditions. It's a good way to educate the public about conditions at a certain point in time, but since that data was made available through a FOIA request they have no means to keep it 'fresh'. The freshness of the data is critical to this project which is why I have been reaching out to the people at APHIS and aligning project goals with APHIS goals.

Historically APHIS has been reluctant to provide data to the public. All too often the data is wanted to bring public shame on the non-compliant licensees. This is in direct conflict with the mission of APHIS to educate licensees. I want to strike a balance to support their mission while increasing the incentive to the licensee to fix their issues and thereby come back into compliance. Doing this 'anonymously', by giving consumers only the license number and the inspection history, should be enough to accomplish the mission providing APHIS assists by providing the data points I am requesting.

This part of the mission I'm not willing to compromise. However this data is not the only possible information that can be provided. We're having discussions offline that are pretty compelling and there are definitely other pieces that can be put into play to make the project more app-worthy. I'll get you cc'd in on that discussion.