The family and estate of Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien, who died in 1973, have put a stop to a cryptocurrency named after him, Reported The Guardian. The domain name JRRToken [dot] com, established up earlier this August by Matthew Jensen, a developer from Florida, was “confusingly close” to the trademark owned by the Tolkien estate, according to a panel of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Since then, the WIPO has stopped the developer from using that name and got an undertaking from them to remove any infringing internet content.
According to Law360, the developer from the United States paid the estate’s legal costs for an undisclosed amount. The JRRToken [dot] com domain name, as well as social media profiles related to the token, have been retrieved by the Tolkien estate.
The JRR Token was introduced in August with the frightening phrase “The One Token That Rules Them All,” as previously indicated. The coin’s designer, Matthew Jensen of Florida, even spent money on an ad with actor Billy Boyd, who played Pippin in The Lord of the Rings series and said in the later deleted short, “Do I think they’re going to the moon? There and back again.”
The Tolkien estate reacted quickly after learning of the token. The estate took action by filing a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), claiming that the token infringed on Tolkien’s trademark rights. According to the filing, the token’s domain name was “particularly tailored to deceive internet users into assuming that it and the website to which it connects have some legitimate economic link” with Tolkien and his work.
Finally, the administrative panel determined that the name was chosen deliberately since the designers could not have been unaware of Tolkien’s works and that they had “built a website to trade off the fame of these works.”
JRR Tolkien’s literary works, such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, have been translated into 36 languages and have sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide.