A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent.
The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows you to describe your product as a hosted version of the ElasticSearch codebase, which provides the substance of the right you were describing, and it's also why you can describe the Toyota car you're selling as a Toyota, both without needing permission from a rights holder.
In the car case, you can also reference the product by name as a Toyota product because it is the same product Toyota sold, just being resold by you. But in the hosted service case, you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission.
This works similarly for lots of software products and services, even other free and open source software projects. Debian has a trademark policy and exercises oversight of modified / derived / integrated versions shipped by the major public cloud providers to make sure that it's consistent enough with Debian's software freedom values, expected functionality, and quality standards to be called Debian, using trademark rights as the way they have that leverage.
At the same time, the cloud providers do not need trademark permission from Debian to redistribute unmodified official Debian images under the name Debian, or to derive from them without using Debian in the product name. (As with the ElasticSearch example, they can still use the word Debian in a fair and accurate way when describing the nature of any derived product they make without trademark permission.)
> you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission.
I don’t know. The orginal AWS-hosted Elastic Search product was the elastic search code, hosted by AWS. That’s fundamentally the same thing. Maybe the exact wording matters and the service name was “AWS managed elastic search” or whatever. I’m sure the Amazon lawyers knew how to name it.
This feels analogous to “Amazon Linux” where it’s clearly Amazon’s version of Linux (which is also a trademark). Or “hosted postgres” or “Postgres compatible RDS” or any number of other services based on OSS.
The confusion between ElasticSearch the software kit and ElasticSearch the hosted service illustrates some of the drawbacks of having the same name for your Open Source product and your business.
Clearly not confused with the original brand, but also advertising a service built off that brand.
Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
There's not really much actual law at work here, it's all civil matters.
But it takes a long time. And it's very costly (especially against a much larger entity like Amazon). Legal battles alone will rarely save you (in time).
[I work for Elastic]
Eg AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (2006) AWS Elastic Block Storage (2008)
I suspect if Elastic tried to take them to court they would have got the trademark thrown out.
