JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle

This shouldn&#x27;t be news to anyone who&#x27;s old enough to remember the internet in the 90&#x27;s. Back then Microsoft named their EMCAScript implementation &quot;JScript&quot; to avoid problems with Sun&#x27;s trademark (I&#x27;m sure everyone on here is already aware that Oracle bought Sun a few years back).<p>However I don&#x27;t think this trademark is worth anything to Oracle any longer. Trademarks need to be defended or they&#x27;re lost. This is why Wordpress have strict rules about how themes and related websites cannot contain the name &quot;Wordpress&quot;; and why you often see ridiculous cases about large companies sending scary legal notices to independent enterprises but then quietly settling out of court for token licence fees like £100 a year.<p>Javascript has long since entered the public domain so I suspect it&#x27;s too late for Oracle to capitalise on their acquired trademark.

Wikipedia says: &quot;Today, &#x27;JavaScript&#x27; is a trademark of Oracle Corporation. It is used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications and current entities such as the Mozilla Foundation.&quot; [1]<p>It&#x27;s one of a long list of Java-related trademarks originally registered by Sun:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100528154600/http://www.sun.com/suntrademarks/#J" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20100528154600&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sun.co...</a><p>Maybe Sun originally intended it to be the name of a Java-related product, and when Netscape invented JavaScript, they found out too late that the name had already been trademarked by Sun, so they licensed the trademark from Sun instead of changing the name? I&#x27;m just guessing. Does anyone know the real history?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Trademark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JavaScript#Trademark</a>

Can&quot;t common use be used to nullify a trademark?

Start calling it PhpScript or LispScript; there would be no loss of accuracy.

Nothing to see here, everyone calls it ECMAScript.

They can always call it JScript.

Amongst many other trademarks. The one that irritates me is that we really really wanted to call the browser &quot;Webrunner&quot; and at the last moment of trademark clearance we heard that Taligent (the Apple&#x2F;IBM thing) had already gotten it. I still have the jacket where we had the stitching done [1]. So we ended up calling it HotJava. Sigh.<p>[1] <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChuckMcManis/posts/hdvbvWCvbuY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;0&#x2F;+ChuckMcManis&#x2F;posts&#x2F;hdvbvWCvbuY</a>

Under what circumstances would they be defending this trademark?

That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s ECMAScript - the official name of the spec ... nothing new.

Unity3d gets around this by calling their adaptation UnityScript.

I ALWAYS had a feeling that something was off about &quot;JavaScript&quot;. I hope Oracle does not decide to start suing everyone using JS like node.js...

Well it&#x27;s ridiculous, but if it can make ecmascript die, why not.<p>&#x2F;troll &#x2F;rant