Yesterday, Jameson Lopp flagged a fully paid trademark application, filed by Coinbase with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, for the word BUIDL. (Definition here.)
Coinbase took a while to respond, which they did via this tweetstorm by CTO Balaji Srinivasan, who claims Coinbase had actually filed for the trademark way back in October and that it "had no intention to prevent the community from using it." Moreover:
In more detail: the team had no intention to prevent the community from using it. There had been thought of a feature named Coinbase BUIDL and they didn’t want to attract patent trolls for a common term. Was 100% defensive filing.
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) December 7, 2018
Nelson Rosario, a Chicago-based intellectual property attorney who founded the blockchain lawyer networking group in that city, immediately disputed Srinivasan's framing:
This is an odd characterization of trademark filings in that it conflates patent trolls and trademark usage. Essentially, trademarks have a use requirement and many patent trolls are in fact not practicing entities that don't do anything with the IP they own. https://t.co/RIciJTLQMt
— Nelson M. Rosario (@NelsonMRosario) December 7, 2018
The Coinbase backtrack included two further puzzling, uh, interpretations of how things had gone down. The first:
PS: to my knowledge, the first use of BUIDL was actually in a talk I gave back in April 2015 way before joining Coinbase. But it’s entered the common crypto lexicon at this point and we wouldn’t have it any other way.https://t.co/NaEyVXBNUb
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) December 7, 2018
Hmm. As Anthony Sassano pointed out earlier today, the first instance of BUIDL was actually a genuine misspelling in a BitcoinTalk.com chatroom in 2011 (if not earlier), not a sudden flash of divine inspiration upon the Coinbase stage.
And second, even more jarring, was this tweet from Srinivasan:
Saw the commotion on Twitter & dug into this. Coinbase filed the trademark for BUIDL some time back. I learned about it today & chatted with team. TLDR is that @brian_armstrong & I don’t believe in trademarks for stuff like this so we’ll be giving this one back to the community.
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) December 6, 2018
"Giving this one back to the community" after a foiled attempt to impose legal protections on it? How generous!
But as property lawyer Cole Davis put it in a response to Rosario, legally the trademark application has not yet been formally abandoned by Coinbase, which is the only way the company could conceivably return it to the public domain:
Damage control and back pedaling. If they didn’t want it just abandon the application w/ the USPTO. And to now portray themselves as heroes for “donating” it to the community when you can’t even do that under TM law. Unreal
— Cole Davis (@ColeSDavis) December 7, 2018
Ah the crypto world, where the public relations cleanup ends up doing more damage than the attempted below-the-radar government filing.