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Almost two years ago, we excitedly wrote about the announcement behind Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority that was focused on dramatically lowering the hurdles towards protecting much more of the internet with HTTPS encrypted connections.Unfortunately, it appears the old guard of certificate authorities doesn't like this very much. Comodo, which has provided certificates for quite some time (and, in fact, is where Techdirt's certificate comes from) has apparently, somewhat ridiculously, been trying to trademark versions of "Let's Encrypt." The most troubling one is the one on purely "Let's Encrypt," but the other two (Comodo Let's Encrypt and Let's Encrypt with Comodo) are equally problematic -- especially since (as Comodo admits directly) it's never used that phrase in offering its existing certificates.This seems like a clear situation where Comodo is seeking to confuse the market -- and thus the clear case where trademark law actually makes some sense. As we've said basically forever, trademark is quite different than copyrights and patents, in that it was really designed as a consumer protection law, to keep consumers from being tricked into buying something that they believe is from a different entity. Trademarks are widely and frequently abused, but there are times where the original intent of consumer protection makes sense, and this seems like one of them. What's incredible is that when Let's Encrypt reached out to Comodo about this, the company refused to abandon the attempt to trademark these names.
