Bitcoin Trademark Officially Registered in Russia

18.04.2016

Leader of Russian Blockchain.community and founder of fintech accelerator Alex Fork has registered Bitcoin as a trademark.

As PLUSworld.ru reported, Bitcoin’s certificate of the trademark is numbered 552645. It is owned by Bitcoin LLC founded by Alex Fork.

According to Fork himself, the patent expires on December 30, 2023. However, he said he wants to “grant it to the community so that businesses could freely use it not caring about patent trolls.”

Fork says Bitcoin LLC doesn’t plan to use the trademark in commercial operations. On the contrary, the whole registration process was initiated to prevent monopolization of Bitcoin as a brand, which could entail money chase.

There have been at least three earlier attempts to register “Bitcoin” as a commercial trademark. All those attempted registrations occurred in 2013 when the cryptocurrency’s price was climaxing.

ForkLog reported earlier that application filed by M-Group LLC has been declined by RosPatent; the second application filed by Intelprom LLC was revoked by the applicant, similar to the third application by Doka LLC.

Notably, in case of M-Group LLC, RosPatent stated that “the identification as provided represents the name of electronic payments system” and eponymous currency. RosPatent also stressed that the very word Bitcoin is a common economic term, and for that reason is not subject to protection against possible copyright infringements.

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