I can guarantee this has nothing to do with Maker Made LLC and/or Makerhub LLC. I told you privately in an email that we had 3rd party Amazon sellers liquidating the Maker Made Maslow CNC kits for us. When the listings were removed from Amazon based on your IP complaint to Amazon, I refused to help them contest the IP and trademark listings with Amazon.
This screenshot in the attachment is an Amazon product - not anything from our website. It is a Maker Made product that is drop shipped, but your logo does not appear anywhere on the product itself. Nor does the product come with a frame. It also contains an old MakerMade logo before the rebranding. The user guide/manual or USB likely has references to Maslow CNC. To my knowledge and my attorney’s research, we have never used the “M Maslow” logo on any of our websites. I cannot speak for others, but I paid the attorney enough to know that, (1) this specific Amazon listing was done under previous management and was never active or modified under my watch, (2) we did not find any references to this logo trademark on our website, and (3) we (by the way of our lawyer) informed the sellers liquidating the product that we would not contest this with Amazon despite their urging for us to do so so they could continue liquidating and keeping the product active.
I can point you to our October 25 (China time, probably 24th your time) emails. These were publically posted, as quoted above. One of my first emails stated:
The problem with Amazon is we have a 3rd party company that manages the Amazon listings for us, and we do the fulfillment. On the other hand, with the makermade.com web site I have more control over since that was acquired as part of my acquisition of Maker Made assets. I can ask our developers to take a look into and remove references if there is a trademark conflict.
You replied to the entire email, and I’m paraphrasing here:
- You did not see a need for me to have an attorney involved, when I respectfully said this was not my expertise and needed to defer to professional counsel.
- You accused me of blackmailing you. …by me suggesting the inventory is available for purchase if you wanted it because I was not going to make any more Maslow CNC kits given your Kickstarter campaign and the success it brought to your new product.
- You asked me to contact the Amazon partner (third party), which I did, to inform them you had a problem. I did NOT know at the time of writing the email your trademark was the “M Maslow” logo mark that the Amazon image was allegedly infringing on (my attorney found this at some point shortly after you posted your video).
- You want MakerMade to cease using a name that you say is causing confusion. Whereas I am stuck on a pile of inventory, that you apparently gave the old CEO of MakerMade permission to use, for a name that is not trademarked. Your logo is not anywhere on our website. We must cite our sources under any open source license agreement your project was published under. And further, those who bought our Maslow CNC kits eventually came to your community.
I replied with (excerpts):
- I do not want to be breaking any laws, nor do I want the transferred assets to have been misrepresented to me.
- The Amazon supplier does not work for Sourcery or Maker Made. They have a license to use the Maker Made name, images, trademarks, etc - for Amazon sales only. We do drop shipping only when an order comes in. I have made them aware of your request.
- When I got involved as their supplier, it was 100% presented to me as a Maslow CNC project. My early references are all to Maslow CNC, including the first production run.
- Your request is certainly not unreasonable by any means.
- But when you start threatening that I am blackmailing you into something, this goes beyond my comfort level, and I do wish to have our attorney review (even more so now that you mention blackmail).
I asked you for your trademark numbers and some other information in two follow-up emails. You twice did not reply. Then, a week later, you posted a really nasty video about Maker Made and its alleged history and continued to defame and disparage Maker Made. Even through your own forums.
Feel free to take it offline if you need anything further.
–t.j.