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Title: Trademarking Bitcoin Post by: casascius on July 09, 2011, 05:02:41 PM Just randomly curious:
Would the community support ME trademarking Bitcoin, if I were to publish beforehand (for the benefit of the community) a notarized letter that automatically and forevermore freely "licensed" the word Bitcoin to anyone who wanted to use it to refer to Satoshi Nakamoto's invention? (And/or whatever terms the consensus of the community decided there needed to be). I would publish this letter as a signed PDF using Adobe Certified Document Services. I might even include a clause that ownership of the trademark would go to the EFF or any open-source software foundation if they ever published a desire to own it. That might trump all these silly trademarks that are being registered, or threatened to be registered, overseas. And perhaps in the event of a domain name dispute, the validity of the US registration would likely trump the Zimbabwean one. Title: Re: Trademarking Bitcoin Post by: wolftaur on July 09, 2011, 05:36:28 PM It would be better if a core developer of the Bitcoin software trademarked it, and added a clause to the software's license that allowed unfettered use of the trademark in conjunction with any use of the software or protocol. This could also be used as a future tool against nonconforming implementations later -- the right to use the registered trademark can be granted to "any application coded by any individual so long as it conforms to the protocol specification", not just the "official" software, and if someone were to write an application which doesn't play fair on the network -- that's nonconforming and they can't call it Bitcoin. :)
Title: Re: Trademarking Bitcoin Post by: error on July 09, 2011, 07:17:35 PM I would support Satoshi trademarking Bitcoin. I don't think I would support anyone else doing it.
Title: Re: Trademarking Bitcoin Post by: bittersweet on July 09, 2011, 07:20:45 PM Don't worry about trademark trolls. They can't do shit, they just didn't realize that yet.
Title: Re: Trademarking Bitcoin Post by: Phinnaeus Gage on July 09, 2011, 07:27:35 PM Don't worry about trademark trolls. They can't do shit, they just didn't realize that yet. The link at the end of the title is a PDF file. THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT’S APPROACH TO DETERRING THE TRADEMARK TROLL: SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR REGISTRATION AND PAY THE COSTS OF LITIGATION http://www.kentlaw.edu/7cr/v3-1/folgers.pdf Here is the quick view link: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ZHLlZn34dmQJ:www.kentlaw.edu/7cr/v3-1/folgers.pdf+trolls+trademark&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg-WGY9_I34WaUgSz-ZzlMy6OdWrI-FQYC1BD838yyv7GLRtE7aqu_cImsy8uucj8JBMdTBkUdIjyyIGF7_uWfcaO_m-ZxPvNwf8jbysOl_8IRnCgsA3v8VC_NPDqA3S4vTK_Nv&sig=AHIEtbRaziLSOI71EeMEZpyGNktxGaZy1A&pli=1 |