Trademark

Can you help this project by writing a letter for us? A letter to confirm Kendra’s established reputation in the world. Here's why...

Back in 1996 Julie McCann (then at City University, London) approached Cerberus Sound + Vision, London, with an idea for a research project. Daniel Harris, then a director of Cerberus Sound + Vision, volunteered to liaise with Julie. Soon after, Julie asked Daniel for a name to give to the project. Daniel chose Kendra. The Kendra project was born and received its first funding. Daniel left Cerberus Sound + Vision to start up Cerbernet. Then in 1999, Daniel registered the domain kendra.org.uk and the Kendra project took on a life of its own and became Kendra Initiative. In 2003 Daniel formed the nonprofit Kendra Foundation. After many conferences and meetings the project finally received more funding in 2008 via an EU FP7 grant and then a string of grants thereafter. In 2011 Daniel registered Kendra as a trademark. In 2014 Daniel registered the domain kendra.io and renamed all the social media to @kendraio. Then in 2017 Daniel renamed the whole project from Kendra Initiative to simply Kendraio, and then in 2018 the nonprofit organisation was gently renamed to Kendraio Foundation.

In 2020 we became aware that Amazon Web Services had released a service called Amazon Kendra, a machine-learning driven search service. Ironically, we discovered this because Amazon had just awarded us 10K USD of AWS credits after winning a music tech competition – and we were looking at what we could buy with the winnings. A few days later our lawyer forwarded us a letter from the UKIPO asking us if we wanted to oppose Amazon's application. After much discussion with many lawyers we chose to do so in the UK and EU. Our lawyers got in touch with Amazon and described the situation – namely that Kendra had been used by us for the last 25 years and that we felt that calling their service Kendra infringed our rights. We never wanted to fight Amazon.

For the last year Daniel has been seeking a coexistence deal with Amazon. Daniel has simply one request of Amazon: promise to not restrict our business anywhere in the world. So far Amazon has not been able to make this promise. For the record, Daniel has currently no intention of blocking Amazon from using the Kendra name, and is not seeking a payout. Daniel just wants a promise that we will be left alone to carry on doing what it is doing with zero restrictions.

So, you may ask, why continue with the opposition if you don't want to ultimately stop Amazon from using the Kendra name and you don't want a big lavish payout? Well, this is a stick in the sand. This is a statement that says: we know we can't stop you, Amazon, but we can put it on record that we were here first, and if you won't provide us with a promise that you'll leave us alone then at least we'll have it in writing publicly that we were here first and perhaps you might have wanted to check who was using the name for machine learning before you decided to use it too, and if they had a trademark. But, hey, we're here now. Let's be friends.

At the time of writing we have already submitted evidence of reputation to support our opposition at the UKIPO and we are now gathering letters from lots of people we know to demonstrate our reputation and support our opposition at the EUIPO.

So, here's a request, if you heard of Kendra anytime since 1996 and you can write the EUIPO a letter to confirm Kendra’s established reputation in the world, then please get in touch with Daniel and we'll show you how. We need your letter by July 11th 2021 as the filing deadline is only a few days after that. Please do not leave it until the last minute. Thanks!

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