Dear all
Thank you very much for your support in this matter and we are glad to see that most of you trust that we are here doing this first and foremost for the community!
That said, there are of course concerns about the integrity and enforceability of our promise to you to make the trademark free and open, and we understand your hesitance to believe in our good intent at this time. While unfortunately we cannot disclose how the actual process of making the trademark open will work at this point, you will within a few months see how any Bitcoin related trademarks we acquire will be protected and available for all without limitation.
We are really looking forward to this new adventure and we are sure that you will all enjoy it, freely!
With all due respect, I think I speak accurately for the community when I say I don't think we want to wait months to find out what your plans are. The name Bitcoin isn't your property, and you have no more right to monopolize it than does Mr. Pascazi.
The urgency is that if we are to stand idle and allow your trademark applications to succeed without exercising our legal rights to oppose them, merely on the grounds we think you'll do the right thing, then we're legally tying our own hands and turning a blind eye to the possibility that you, or perhaps more likely, your eventual successors, might pull something like a Pascazi.
I think it would be appropriate if, for example, you requested donations toward the cause, because clearly it isn't free. And taking your word at face value, I applaud what you're doing. But your word as a forum posting means nothing to a court, and that's unfortunately where it counts. Providing anything less than a legally sound licensing agreement to benefit the public - one that explicitly grants an irrevocable right to use the term to mean Bitcoin as we now know it - is to play us the same way Pascazi's playing. At the very least, you guys need to be PGP-signing these claims that your intent is to open these marks to all, and I mean that as a very low least. I think it's very reasonable that your intent to license these marks freely to us as a community be provable by any interested party, and thus far it is not.