Node.js has a trademark now

From Trademark Policy:<p><i>Examples of things which are not nominative fair use and not permitted without a license:<p>• Use of a trademark in a domain name (e.g., nodeconsultingservices.com)</i><p>They trademarked "Node.js", but claim that having "node" in your domain requires a license?<p>Edit: BTW, I have registered this domain.

Trademarks are interesting.<p>I don't know if this is an apples to apples comparison, but I remember 5 years back there was a big issue with JBoss and trademarks. One guy trademarked the name and made a boatload of money when his group sold the rights to Redhat. And I believe many of the open source developers that contributed were not allowed to use the name for commercial purposes.<p><a href="http://thejbossissue.blogspot.com/2005/10/free-open-source-software-foss-and.html" rel="nofollow">http://thejbossissue.blogspot.com/2005/10/free-open-source-s...</a><p>Does anyone know if there is some kind of 'open source trademark' to prevent a Marc Fleury/JBoss incident?

noone cares that Ruby on Rails is a registered trademark of DHH, see '"Rails", "Ruby on Rails", and the Rails logo are registered trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson. All rights reserved.' on the bottom of rails website.<p>They want to use that name, and they won't sue people for making consultancy business based on that technology for certain, since that's the way development of platform goes.

Be aware, anybody who is thinking of securing a Trademark for their product/business etc. A Trademark is not like copyright, you <i>must</i> enforce it as soon as you find out about a violation or lose it. That explains why many companies get tangled up in lawsuits that might otherwise not be in their best interest (shutting down fan projects, suing partners or non-related companies, etc.).<p>In otherwords, you better have a legal account set aside and stuffed full of money.

This sentence from the post doesn't quite mean what was intended:<p><i>We decided to introduce trademarks on the “Node.js” and the “Node logo” in order to ensure that people or organisations who are not investing in the Node community misrepresent, or create confusion about the role of themselves or their products with Node.</i><p>(Throwing in another negative – "...to ensure that people or organizations who are not investing... <i>can't</i> misrepresent.." – would be a quick fix at the cost of introducing a double-negative. But I'd suggest a more radical simplification: "...in order to prevent anyone from misrepresenting their role with Node.")

This is probably the best way they could have handled it. It protects the name from abuse while still allowing enough freedom for those wanting to use it legitimately.<p>They don't call Ryan Dahl a BDFL for nothing.

We have emailed Joyent in regards to this new 'policy'. Also, the fellas at NodeJitsu are in the same boat.

I didn't realize that it is possible to trademark something after it has been used widely as a non-trademarked term. Isn't that why Aspirin couldn't be trademarked?