So what you're saying is Evan rage quits and sells the password to the Darkcoin repo for $10.00 to some guy in Canada, that's it? That new dev can do whatever he wants with the Darkcoin name and brand? There is no legal recourse for the Darkcoin owners? Heh. I think not...
There is an official dev team and official foundation and official board. If they all agree to sell then I guess then, "that's it".
Are you saying that the Darkcoin foundation's board has legal control over the Darkcoin digital currency and can do what they want with a simple majority vote and darkcoin holders have no legal recourse in such an event?
@MyFarm
OK, let me try this with a different example like Bitcoin so we don't get confused. As you very well observed coins are not shares in a business but property. When you buy 20 BTC you are not buying 20 shares of Bitcoin and have no saying in the direction the project is taking your coins are just property that you acquired and you now own, just like if you would buy 20 Macbooks per my previous example.
Trademark rights can only be owned by an entity either a natural entity (a person) or corporate entity like a Foundation or a corporation. In the case of coins the tradermark right initially resides with the developer of the coin as they came up with the original idea, but many developers neglect this step to formally register their trademark. So the first business that can prove use of the name in a commercial environment and files a trademark application may get it. The best example is, Do you know who owns the Bitcoin trademark not everyone that owns Bitcoin as you are trying to imply, it is owned by MtGox: The company overseeing bankruptcy proceedings for Mt. Gox hopes to raise millions by selling the 'Bitcoin' trademark.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10859773/Bitcoin-trademark-up-for-sale-at-580000.htmlIn this particular case the only person that could contest that trademark was probably Satoshi Nakamoto, but you only have a window of time to do that and I am sure that has expired.
I hope this makes it clear that when a developer launches a coin and assigns it a name, he owns the trademark if he is smart enough to register it. The miners that start mining the blockchain are awarded coins for their services and those coins are not shares, thus they get no special voting rights from them. Only when the developer formally registers the trademark does he really own it, as you can see in Bitcoin that is very much not the case, as Satoshi Nakamoto went missing and did not contest it on time.
But I am absolutely positive that if you bought 51% of all Bitcoins in existence you would have 0 IP rights and MtGox would still own the Bitcoin trademark.
About the DASH process in particular, the process is absolutely being handled by Intellectual Property Lawyers in the United States. I hope this is helpful.
