Quote from: DooMAD on January 11, 2018, 06:32:29 PM

The thing with trademarks is that someone generally has to own the trademark. Since no individual or company owns Bitcoin, there's no one to legally enforce a trademark. It's unlikely the community would ever accept or generally be comfortable with any single person having that much power or influence over Bitcoin's name. Bitcoin's code is released as open source and free for anyone to modify as they see fit. There's nothing in the licensing that specifically states users can't use the name "Bitcoin" in their forks.

Here's the full wording:

Code:

The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2009-2018 The Bitcoin Core developers
Copyright (c) 2009-2018 Bitcoin Developers

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

The key words being "without restriction" and "without limitation", providing they include the copyright notices. BCH devs have included those in Bitcoin ABC, albeit from earlier dates. So yeah, the usual 'I-am-not-a-lawyer' disclaimer applies, but I can't see they have anything to worry about in terms of infringement.

I hear you and understand what you're saying. That said, I have some stipulations to make here without getting into too much legality.

First of all, I'm talking about trademark law, not copyright. The second half of what you said is all related to copyrights. In general, copyrights are meant to protect the original product or work and all forms of distribution/re-distribution of it. Trademarks are meant to protect consumers from the source of the good, product, or service.

Second, regarding the registration - there is still common law trademark law, at least in the United States. By virtue of having a product or service that is well-known, you have legally protected rights to that trademark.

And yes, of course the same legal disclaimer exists from my side as well. Thanks for the response!

rossrjensen

Posts

Merits