Bluesky Secures AT Protocol Trademark to Protect Developers from Legal Abuse
Bluesky Trademarks ATProto
We recently acquired the AT Protocol trademark to shield our community from bad actors trying to hijack the name. This defensive move ensures developers can freely build on atproto without fear of legal threats. While we own the mark now, everyday use remains free, with licensing only required for commercial branding. We plan to transfer ownership to an independent governance body soon, following the lead of other major open-source projects.
We're trying to shield atproto developers from having all their hard work undone by someone abusing the legal system.
- rudyfraser
Chiming in to say as the CEO of Blacksky that not only do we have an independent AT Protocol implementation in Rust (https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky)
Not only do we run a fully independent stack (https://docs.blacksky.community/readme/list-of-our-services)
Not only are we getting paid by other orgs to stand up independent app view servers.
We also received a license from Bluesky for the atproto trademark.
There are no qualms in the ecosystem from people making money, getting users, and providing new experiences about this.
It’s not “AT Protocol fans” who aren’t taking issue with this. It’s business with employees and organizations making a positive impact.
It’s easy to criticize if you’re not actively shipping things.
- pfraze
> Bluesky recently acquired the rights to the trademark for “ATPROTOCOL” and its variants—including “AT Protocol” and “atproto”—from another company that was threatening to take legal action preventing the company and others from using the term. Now that Bluesky owns it, the atproto community’s continued use of the mark can be protected.
The policy around usage is shared in the rest of the post but the goal is to make this very simple for everyone
- 1shooner
>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future.
I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?
- eqvinox
Cool people use ActivityPub.
Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when.
- spankalee
This would be much better titled "Bluesky Acquires the AT Protocol Trademark"
- derektank
Any word on which entity was trying to trademark it first?
- colesantiago
I can’t imagine being a first time bootstrapped founder running a business without a trademark and not knowing that someone with bad faith would just register a trademark and just sue or order you to change your name.
These are the things that most startups account for when raising capital.
- bbor
Thank god!