The 90 days notice period ends before the anticipated activation of NU6.
We request that you publicly commit to either:
use the trademark solely to protect against its misuse by scammers or clear abusers of the mark and not use it to attempt to govern the direction of the protocol,
or to relinquish the trademark completely.
This also reflects the will of the broader Zcash community as evidenced in recent community polling.
If ZF retains ownership of the mark, termination of the trademark agreement will revoke all ECC trademark rights. We request an ongoing limited license to continue providing community services, such as maintaining the z.cash website and managing the Zcash X account, unless or until another owner or solution is found.
The ZF Board is considering options and taking advice on how the trademark should be managed going forward. It’s an important decision, and we don’t intend to rush it.
For the time being, there’s be no major changes. We’ll continue to maintain and protect the trademark, take down scammers and fraudsters, etc. ECC will continue to maintain key properties like the @Zcash twitter handle and the z.cash website.
This is the complete second iteration of the trademark debacle (I believe someone has a tshirt). I don’t really pretend to understand it completely now, nor then.
It has been almost 7 months since ECC made the announcement of not continuing with the trademark agreement.
How many more months do they need to make a decision , I don’t think they are too busy with Zebra and FROST that in their constant discussions about such an agreement they still haven’t come to a decision on it.
It’s unfortunate how long they take at Zcash for basically EVERYTHING, they must wait for Halley’s comet to pass again to make any decision.
If someone holds the TM then they have the ability to file disputes with sketchy domains hosts/registrars to have them removed.
Or to prevent someone from making Zcashclassic, Zcash2, realZcash, liteZcash, Zcash_token, etc… and causing public confusion. In that case a TM can be filed with an exchange to prevent listing or other disputes against domains filed as mentioned above.
So in that regard I support having some sort of TM in place to prevent abuse, but I believe Josh is seeking some sort of assurance that it won’t be used to influence Zcash governance decisions.
I don’t know how TMs work enough to know how/if that kind of clause is possible. Most of time, as with copyright, it’s all or nothing and you must regularly enforce TM or you risk losing it.
As you know the Zcash network is decentralized, core teams and users have zero control or insight to what other users do with their funds and couldn’t stop them even if they wanted to.
TM has no effect on what users choose to do with Zcash, but it can help users understand what’s real Zcash and what’s not.
If we want to go 100% wild west Bitcoin route, meaning zero parties have TM rights over the name, then that’s always an option. But it risks what’s also happened in Bitcoin: imagine if someone else took control of the name “Zcash” and decided to start suing everyone they didn’t like (Craig Wright anyone?).
It’s my understanding that it would now be difficult to register the mark due to prior use, common law rights, and its current widespread use in the public domain.
Additionally, the mark is only protected in the jurisdictions in which it is registered. It is not protected, for example, in China (or wasn’t when I managed it) and the ticker ZEC is not widely protected, if still protected anywhere.
As you mentioned above, the primary concern of mine and many others in the community is lack of clarity from the ZF on if they would attempt to use their ownership of the mark in the jurisdictions like the USA, to control governance.
This could occur, for example, if there was a contentious fork and the ZF unilaterally decided to enforce their control of the name by telling exchanges that a certain chain must be called Zcash rather than allowing the exchange to make its own assessment.
At a minimum, a self-imposed restriction to limit ZF’s powers to cases of obvious scams or frauds, would allow the community to use the mark freely (ex. Keystone wallet contest), and create variations for promotions (selling Zcash related swag without having to sign an agreement with ZF), while giving the community confidence that the community’s will could not be circumvented in issues of governance.
, I don’t think they are too busy with Zebra and FROST that in their constant discussions about such an agreement they still haven’t come to a decision on it.