Claiming the name and code of failed or inactive coins?

[chalsengi]

There are so many coins that have become failed or inactive (or were just scams).

Some actually had decent names and associated codes.

How would one go about claiming the name and code of such coins, in order to use them for entirely new projects?

What conflicts would one likely encounter when attempting to do so?

I doubt there is any official register for the codes, or the names, and rather it is just something the exchanges use for coins they support. Inactive, abandoned coins could potentially be dislodged from exchanges by well-supported project's coins (that carry the name and code of some old sh*tcoin) right?

[Spoetnik]

Find the orig dev etc and contact them.
Ask them to hand over the Github account password..

Centralized coins do in fact have a master holding the keys.

And some "dev's" have a rather large set of keys  
In 2013 it was common for guys to pre-register huge lists of names on Github.

Hmm who owns the Monero Github account ?

[chalsengi]

Yes but github accounts do not dictate to the world what the coin names and codes it should accept are, right?

It would be possible to simply make an account with a variation from the other coin's name. For example, if there was a GenericCoin1 (XGC), you could just make GenericCoin2 (also XGC).

The world then decides whether or not to now accept GenericCoin2 as XGC, and no longer accept GenericCoin1 as XGC.

[Spoetnik]

You asked, i told you the answer.. almost always that is how it goes.
You were not asking about changing the name.
If you want to do that then download the source code and change the name and release it..
Then upload it to Github
..with YOUR Github name + password LOL