On thursday, January the 23th 2014 I received from the law firm Shartsis Friese LLP a Cease & Desist letter labelled Trademark Infringement by "In the poche".

poche is a free (as in freedom) and open source application which allows saving Web contents for further reading developed by a single French individual (based in France). Its website is hosted at http://www.inthepoche.com and its source code is freely available at https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag.

Here are the claims:

• I'm using the name poche — which is the French translation for the word Pocket — as well as mentionning read-it-later

• The poche logo, which pictures a pocket, looks like yours

• In this tweet https://twitter.com/wallabagapp/status/423786365944225792, I'm supposed to depict Pocket as being unfree

And here are the required actions I'm told by your lawyers before January the 31th, 2014:

• cease and desist all infringing activity, including but not limited to using "poche", "read-it-later" or the infringing logo in connection with any software application

• cease and desist from making any false statements of fact about Pocket in connection with advertising any competing applications, including but not limited to your assertion that Pocket is not free of charge to users.

So here's an official statement of mine regarding these claims & required actions:

• I'm using the term poche for my app. This is indeed the French word for Pocket, but also a common word in French. Legally, nothing prevents me from using it.

• The logo will be updated, I've already updated the poche twitter account avatar accordingly http://twitter.com/wallabagapp

• All occurences of the name read-it-later have been removed from wallabag.org, and I'll delete all posts mentionning it from my social network accounts in the upcoming days

• I've never defamed Pocket. I said on twitter that Pocket was a non-free application, which means proprietary software — which is actually true. To be nice to you, I've removed any mention of Pocket from the poche website where I simply mentioned that poche allows migration from a Pocket account to a poche one. Though if you don't mind I'll keep mentionning Pocket as an alternative to poche in this page http://www.inthepoche.com/poche-alternatives/

To summarize, I'd like to hear directly from you (so we avoid lawyer noise) about these changes : I'd like to keep using the poche name, the inthepoche.com domain and the @getpoche twitter account. I'm removing all mention of Pocket from the website and won't ever be mentioning you again in any poche public communications. Last, the logo will be updated.

You can reach me at nicolas@loeuillet.org. Please don't call me by phone as I'm not fluent in English (this open letter has been translated by someone else).

Regards, Nicolas