Node.js has a trademark now | Hacker News Reader

Node.js has a trademark now

blog.nodejs.org

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From Trademark Policy:

Examples of things which are not nominative fair use and not permitted without a license:

• Use of a trademark in a domain name (e.g., nodeconsultingservices.com)

They trademarked "Node.js", but claim that having "node" in your domain requires a license?

Edit: BTW, I have registered this domain.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Joyent, and I can speak for the company but this is not legal advice.

My personal understanding of trademark law is that it is within a given domain. If you use "Node" in place of "Node.js" but are clearly talking about "Node.js" then you might be infringing on the trademark.

However, it is not our intention to stop anyone from doing open source or business using Node. We'd love to give you a free license to use the mark, please email "trademark [at] joyent [dot] com".

Our intention here is to make sure there are some protections against bad sports. People doing good legitimate work with Node is awesome and we want to encourage that. Mostly we need to do this thing with lawyer so if some hypothetical organisation in the future tried to do something bad and call it Node.js we can stop them. We don't want people to misrepresent a product as Node.js when it isn't, and damage the good name of the Node community.

trademark [at] joyent [dot] com is the best place for questions but you are welcome to reach out to me directly too. I'm tom [at] joyent [dot] com or @sh1mmer on Twitter.

Thanks for your response. I have no doubts that Joyent have good intentions. I'm not a member of Node.js community, so don't take this as me personally (or my company) having an issue with Joyent trademarking the name.

I understand that creating a company with the name "Node Consulting, Inc." that provides Node.js consulting services may create confusion. But why forbid the use of term in the domain name without agreement? For example, Python's trademark policy (http://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) says that you can't name your company "The Python Company", but they have nothing here about domains.

I have read http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Trademark:_Domain_Names and the situation about trademarks and domain names is not clear...

Also, why didn't Joyent register "Node" trademark as well?

To your last question, they did: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...

Thanks. Now it's more clear.

I honestly thought that real normal english words could not be trademarked (scottish law). I think I'll trademark the word Hacker if no-one else has... You'll all owe me a fortune!

They would be able to prevent you from using "nodeconsultingservices" to provide consulting services for Node.js, but I suspect they won't try to sue people who just coincidentally have Node in their name, especially if they predate the trademark filing or the project itself. The word "node" is simply a noun, in wide use across a number of disciplines above and beyond computer science, and they can't just grab it wholesale. Think "Microsoft Windows"; the fact that it is trademarked up the wazoo has not prevented the use of the term in its preexisting manners.

IANAL, but it's not time to panic yet.

That's because they can't, in the US trademarks are scoped to the domain they exist in.

That's what I was wondering too. My business name is Leftnode Software, my domain is leftnode.com, I've gone by the moniker leftnode for a while now (from before node.js development started, I believe). I hope that was just a typo in their document and they meant nodejsconsultingservices.com would not be allowed.

Node is a common word. I would fight them to the death if they sued me over nodecode.com (which someone has already private registered). IMHO, this is just a precursor to a sellout.

FWIW http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...

If that is true, it's one way to legally enforce your own search relevance, but it sucks for everyone else involved.

Trademarks are interesting.

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.

http://thejbossissue.blogspot.com/2005/10/free-open-source-s...

Does anyone know if there is some kind of 'open source trademark' to prevent a Marc Fleury/JBoss incident?

Disclaimer: I work at Joyent, not legal advice, yada yada

We don't want to be that guy, but we have to enforce the trademark now (in order to keep it), to allow us to use it stop any abuse to the community that might happen in the future.

Ask your lawyer for advice on whether this is a good idea or not, but I have heard of people protecting their trademark by sending out "Permit and Proceed" letters when they identified people using their mark in a non-harmful way that would otherwise require trademark defense.

Looks like I heard that from an old Slashdot story about Linden Labs: http://slashdot.org/story/07/01/31/0216258/Linden-Labs-Sends...

Surely the trademark is node.js - that's what everyone calls it...

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.

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 must 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.).

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:

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.

(Throwing in another negative – "...to ensure that people or organizations who are not investing... can't 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.

They don't call Ryan Dahl a BDFL for nothing.

What kind of abuse?

Someone registering the trademark underneath them, using the trademark for illegal activities, pretty much anything negative.

Some people seem to be alarmed and think that you won't be able to use node/node.js in your domain names, but you just need to get a license. Like with anything else.

Cool. So if/when Oracle buys Joyent they won't use the trademark for nefarious purposes?

Why not transfer it to Apache? Have people abused Apache server? Apache Lucene? Apache CouchDB?

We heard the same thing from Sun about Java. It's a slippery slope.

Anyone who puts a lot of time or effort into Node at this point and later gets burned has no one to blame but themselves.

I would prefer that node was part of a non-profit foundation of some kind rather than Joyent, but that is largely under the bridge at this point. It was discussed heavily when this change was made in november 2010:

http://markmail.org/message/wyi2r4ntzlmawp6e#query:+page:1+m...

The thing to keep in mind is that this is just a trademark on a product. It isn't a patent on the idea of a server side evented javascript engine. There is nothing stopping someone from creating another engine that works exactly the same way and that is compatible with all the current modules.

I highly doubt that Joyent is going to slinging around lawsuits as if they were a firm involved in mobile phone patents.

Node.js is MIT licensed, so no, that won't happen.

"Anyone who puts a lot of time or effort into Node at this point and later gets burned has no one to blame but themselves."

Exactly. I was getting into it, but I am going to ditch it until this is all sorted out.

Doesn't that seem reactionary and knee jerk? Do you not use countless other products because their names have been trademarked by an organization?

Um ... yeah. Anything that Microsoft touches.

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?

"used widely" is very relative.

the word "node" has been used widely for years, they seem to be claiming rights to that word - the joyent rep above says that they are not claiming rights to the word node, but the text of the claim I just read states just that. don't get me wrong, i'm not a competitor or anyting - node.js is a cool tech that I'm currently playing with (would likely not have clicked the link otherwise), but the MASSIVE distinction between node.js and the simple word node is cause for concern for me

Exactly ... they CANNOT trademark the word Node. This word has been in the dictionary since the 16th century derived from the Latin word nōdus, meaning knot.

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