Even fewer would have the resources to actually pursue legal action if the trademark is infringed upon.
This is probably not a realistic suggestion for all but a few hundred projects.
Trademarks don't need to be registered and many trademarks simply exist through active use.
However, your second paragraph is the key one. While trademarks don't need to be registered (and, in any case, trademark registrations are mostly on a country by country basis) it's pretty much on you to spend the money to defend your trademark if you want to do so. No one's going to do it for you.
Maybe $5,000 if you're talking about high-touch legal help or the trademarks are dicey.
1: https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/united-states-strong-ri...
Edit: Not copyright -> trademark
The point of open source is that you can modify it. But can you modify it and still call it the same name? If so, how much can you modify it?
> 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
In simplified words, it's a screen recording software that also lets you stream to twitch and other streaming portals. In practice it does way more than that though.
The same thing apparently happened with Meta: http://meta.company/.
https://twitter.com/Lightstream/status/1460709404609757185
And, also in that thread, El Gato -- makers of the hardware Stream Deck -- chimed in with a wry "know that feel," showing that "Streamlabs Stream Deck" was, let's say, strongly reminiscent of their product.
Clearly I'm wrong but I doubt I'm the only person who thought that. Seems like they're being douchebags if they're just taking the offensive and filing predatory trademarks.
https://twitter.com/StuV2/status/1460710778462482440
Nearly identical titles, nearly identical general page layout, similar graphics.
They even verbatim copied the user testimonial text.
My guess is that they're going to Google Adwords themselves to the top of every relevant google search, and trick even people who have been to the correct OBS Project site into thinking "oh yeah, this is it, I'm in the right place!" and downloading streamlabs-obs.
The OBS pages are copyrighted, so it seems to me like OBS Project should be able to hit Streamlabs' web providers with some DMCA complaints.
https://trademarks.justia.com/882/96/streamlabs-88296466.htm...
In response someone likely affiliated with OBS filed their own trademark, though that was abandoned:
