Brave is infringing Google's trademark on Chrome

[ghost]

a) Brave by default lies in the user agent that it is Chrome. Chrome is a trademark of Google[1] and cannot be used without their permission, unless it is being used as an adjective.

b) If this does not change, we are likely to report to Google that you are infringing their trademark.[2][3]

c) Chrome is directly associated with Google, and Brave does not have the permission to use the trademark.

d) Brave is a for profit organization building a product that directly competes with Google, many websites would not like their users to use Brave, and Brave causes financial losses to companies, which also cause a reputation damage to Google as it appears more Chrome users use adblockers but they are not.

e) Brave affects our analytics and gets falsely identified as a product by Google. Doing this by default means that Brave is committing a fraud, as we are more likely to associate Chrome with adblocked revenue loss, even though it is not the product.[4][5]

---

Brave has 30 days before we make a direct report to Google, unless they change their fraudulent behavior.

Sources:

[1] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/trademark-list.html [2] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html [3] https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/brand-terms.html [4] http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:wnyew0.2.4 [5] http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:wnyew0.2.5

[bbondy]

Thanks for your message but we are not obligated to not use the word Chrome in the User-Agent HTTP header and we do not believe this is a trademark violation. Take for example Chrome who also does not feel obligated to not use Gecko, Mozilla, Safari, Macintosh, Intel, AppleWebKit, KHTML, Mac, and OS X like they do.

Chrome's user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.139 Safari/537.36

Please see the HTTP 1.1 spec here which clearly specifies that you can use multiple product tokens.

User agents SHOULD include this field with requests. The field can contain multiple product tokens

If you read up on Brave you will see that we're providing a revenue stream for ad-block users. You can sign up here: https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org/

I'd like to encourage you to sign up as a publisher and also to ask your ad block users in other browsers to use Brave instead.

[ghost]

We use the same user agent for reasons of web compatibility and also to avoid fingerprinting because of our relatively smaller user base.

Fingerprinting or not is not our concern. Google adds a User-Agent for Chrome, that makes Chrome unique. Brave fools us into thinking that it is a product by Google, and we were thinking that Chrome got a higher usage of adblockers, which could have caused accidental defamation of Chrome. If a malicious activity takes palace from Brave's user, we cannot know which software it came from. What Brave essentially does is that is falsely advertises its self as a product made by Google in the User-Agent. You are not allowed falsely advertise youself as Chrome, This results in unpredictable experiences for Brave and Chrome users, because Brave is not Chrome! Brave is a fork of Chromium. You have to add an extra User-Agent, to allow us to identify Brave and not as a product by Google.

We request that some mechanism to identify Brave is given.

Please see the HTTP 1.1 spec here which clearly specifies that you can use multiple product tokens.

It says to USE multiple product token, not EXACT copying of a token of some other product.

We are not interested in signing up as a publisher.

[thebouv]

It's like you don't even know what a User-Agent is @FineHub

Read this article on the history of User-Agent strings -- it's pretty funny actually.
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Brave is under no obligation as you state, and there is no infringement. Google isn't going to give a damn. Make your report to Google -- I'm sure they're really going to pay attention to you.

[bsclifton]

Fingerprinting or not is not our concern.

Can you clarify who our is?

[ghost]

As a website, it is not our concern about what your (Brave's) intentions are. We dont identify users if they opt out, nor do we allow any 3rd parties to do it. Our partners are not allowed to sell the user data either, and we have proved it by taking action against the infringers.

But we do block adblock users, and users from browsers which block non intrusive 3rd party targeted ads which meets acceptable ads criteria, by default. The ads are targeted with standard cookies (no fingerprinting out of respect of user privacy). Brave blocks our ads by default, and block 3rd party cookies that help deliver better quality ads. We cannot/will not partner with any webbrowser/company that takes away the freedom from us as a publisher. Blocking all trackers and non Brave ads is not a good thing. If Brave is a respectable company, they'll show it up in useragent so we can block Brave visitor. We are very clear that we dont want Brave.

As for BAT, we dont need it. Google's micro payment system is getting ready, and will do the same thing. By blackmailing publishers and forcing Brave's "Better, non-tracking, by default", you'll not gain our support, nor of the industries that makes the free internet possible.

[luyongxu]

@FineHub Can you elaborate on Google's micro payment system?

[bsclifton]

@FineHub what is to gain for the end user by making Brave easy to detect and block? Why should any employee or community member put forth the effort to make this change?

Have you also considered that users do not want to be tracked? Sure, it might help deliver more relevant ads... because advertising networks are tracking the users activity across sites. What is your response to those users who do not wish to be tracked?

[ghost]

leaving my personal opinion out of the picture... What is to gain for the end user by making Brave easy to detect and block? Why should any employee or community member put forth the effort to make this change?

Because we dont want to approach Google and ask them to create an API that distinguishes Chrome from Chromium, backed by DRM. If we do, expect your browser to be blocked by the next 2-3 Chrome releases. We dont want to do it, as it harms other browsers based on Chromium that have nothing to do with adblocking, but will be caught up in this battle. Already several non standard API's in Chrome allow that, and Brave is detectable to us. We instead want to do it the respectable way, which is by the User-Agent. Already most major publishers are against your attitude, and if we release our script, it'll take your engineers 1 month to reverse engineer it, than we got 10 more ways. Brave probably does not want to go for this battle, as it'll ruin your browsers user experience too, and waste your time as well as ours. You dont want to play the cat and mouse game, do you?

---

There is a standard advertising tracking opt-out tool available. It is available at http://optout.networkadvertising.org/?c=1#!/ . Every single ad on our website has an icon on top that links to it. Instead of blocking ad networks that do not respect the choice, you are blocking ad networks that are legit and give opportunity to opt out.

We respect user privacy, but for those users who are the majority, are not so much concerned about privacy, so why are we over hyping privacy and causing paranoia? We even conducted survey with the general public regarding this. We asked them if they would like to pay for websites or would want them for free? They replied free. We told them if they chose the free option, they will have to see ads on websites. Would they mind ads that track them and personalize according to their behavior? They replied that they dont want to be tracked.

When we asked them further that if ads dont track them, they wont be relevant, with an example: if they like Justin Biber's music, but instead would see ads about Donald Trump's covfefe, instead of Justin Biber's new album, because the advertiser cant figure out if you like Justin Biber or Donald Trump, so he just gave you Trump ads. Would they then want ads relevant to them with tracking or would prefer privacy. Their response as unexpectedly as it is for the privacy advocates was: They'd rather watch relevant Ad that tracks them. Of course a tiny minority would still want privacy, and this is why proper tools like http://optout.networkadvertising.org exist.

The web is funded by ads and will continue to be mostly, and people are okay with tracking as long as the ads are not intrusive, and they are not made paranoid by OSS advocates and privacy advocates. If the pro privacy users dont trust http://optout.networkadvertising.org/ than Brave should have a setting to disable 3rd party cookie, but it should not be very accessible, that any user randomly tinkering with their settings accidentally disables it.

We'd rather continue supporting Google, because there we have a choice for our bushiness model and are not dictated by you.

PS: Brave and BAT is only afloat because people are buying it right now. You business model is not sustainable, and during your experiment, you are likely to hurt our business too, so we want to avoid you guys. Even if your model is mildly sustainable, Google will kill it, as simply their scale is enough. The anti tracking marketing stunts you make can be debunked by critical security flaws that exist right now in your code base. Surprisingly you push changes without proper reviews.

[thebouv]

This is golden.

If Brave repo maintainers are not aware, "FineHub" has been talking on Reddit and HackerNews too. Started off discussing Firefox, but it has devolved a bit -- much like here, though here FineHub is being a lot more (amusingly) aggressive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012178 and https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/

I believe HN is what pointed me here and I'm glad it did for the entertaining read.

[ghost]

This is golden. If Brave repo maintainers are not aware, "FineHub" has been talking on Reddit and HackerNews too. Started off discussing Firefox, but it has devolved a bit -- much like here, though here FineHub is being a lot more (amusingly) aggressive.

It is golden and entertaining until you are in the same situation.

[ghost]

Closing the issue. Brave team should look forward to the things I've said. It is better to reconsider your stance at this point. I know I've been aggressive, but maybe Brave needs to become a bit soft on adblocking and 3rd party cookies, by default and educate users on what affect it might have. I am an advocate of the open web, but this time it is backfiring. Brave now has a responsibility, since its 2 million strong now, to use their authority, and not overpower publishers. It would be better to keep a balance been UX and sustainability of the web that is not dependent on Brave's ecosystem.

[bsclifton]

@FineHub if you're wanting Brave to use a unique user agent, you can give this issue a +1 if you'd like: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/3693

[BrendanEich]

Users of top browsers can configure their user agent via advanced preferences, and do. User-agent is not reliable, nor should anyone rely on it to block ad-blockers. There are much bigger ad-blocking extensions out there in terms of user populations than Brave, so I am not sure why @FineHub starts with us. But it's a free country!