The cacographic Shiba Inu who emerged from the internet back in 2013 wasn’t particularly funny or imaginative, coming as it did six years after the original malaprop animal meme, the British shorthair with a taste for cheeseburgers. Nor, frankly, was the cryptocurrency created in the dog’s jesting honor later that year, Dogecoin. I mean, sure, it may have been funny to the handful of people who created it or were otherwise in on the gag. But it’s definitely not original in any meaningful way, and not just because there have been more than 100 successors created in its wake.
Dogecoin itself was originally created by copying and tweaking another open-source cryptocurrency project called luckycoin. Luckycoin was a tweaked version of litecoin, which was a tweaked version of bitcoin…. “It’s a copy of a copy of a copy,” Mr. Versetti said of dogecoin. “There is absolutely nothing valuable in the code itself. It exists purely due to its community, not for any technological reasons.”
What is funny is how deadly serious some people (idiots, mostly, and even its formerly puckish co-creator) now take this bad inside joke, how closely they follow every utterance about it from the likes of people who don’t take it seriously like Elon Musk and treat them like crucial fundamentals. But that sort of thing is funny in a “ha ha” kind of way, an arch meta-meta-joke on the meta-joke that is Doge in the first place, and the initial and unintentional joke that are cryptocurrencies writ large. This, on the other hand? This is genuinely, uproariously, laugh-out-loud funny.
The Dogecoin Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit formed in 2014 by dogecoin’s creators and supporters, didn’t file an official claim on the dogecoin brand name until late August. Its filing now sits beside half a dozen others before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, all vying for the exclusive use of the dogecoin brand, which, in addition to cryptocurrencies, has sprung up on applications to use it for baby blankets and men’s suits.
“Most believed it’s not worth registering those trademarks because who knows how long this would survive. Now we basically are ruing that a little bit,” said Jens Wiechers, a Dogecoin Foundation board member. The group, which became defunct for several years, relaunched in August….
Moon Rabbit AngoZaibatsu’s founder, Angel Versetti…. said he created another Cook Islands-based company called the Dogecoin Foundation this year. Last month, the Colorado-based Dogecoin Foundation said the Cook Islands dogecoin was “attempting to profit unfairly off of the goodwill Dogecoin has built.”
“We’re not doing it with any malicious intent,” Mr. Versetti said. “We thought it was abandoned, we thought it desperately needed guidance. We’re not going to make a U-turn just because the big kid came back to the playground.”
Dogecoin Copycats? Trademark Fight Erupts Over Joke Crypto Worth Billions [WSJ]
For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.
