ENS developers are urged to relinquish ownership of non-stop domains or face lawsuits.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) founder and lead developer Nick Johnson is urging blockchain domain company Unstoppable Domains to abandon a recently awarded patent or face a lawsuit, according to an open letter shared by X (formerly Twitter).

In January, Unstoppable Domains was granted the first patent, US11558344, which claims Braden River Pezshki, Matthew Everett Gould and Bogdan Gusiev are the inventors of a technology that uses blockchain technology to define domains. The patent application was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2021.

According to Johnson, the patent is entirely based on ENS's invention and contains no new invention of its own. The ENS document states:

“The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open and extensible name system based on the Ethereum blockchain. The job of ENS is to map human-readable names such as ‘alice.eth' to Ethereum addresses, other machine-readable identifiers. The cryptocurrency Addresses, content hashes and metadata.

In the year In an open letter published Nov. 17, Johnson said all ENS work is under open source licenses, with all standards publicly available for implementation. According to him, repeated attempts to contact the unsettled parties about the matter have failed in recent months.

“UD then issued a press release promising the first patent to the Web3 Domain Alliance, an industry group established and managed by non-stop domains. We appreciate the sentiment behind this, but unfortunately, press releases are not legally binding,” Johnson said. In the thread.

“So we ask that non-stop domains put legal weight behind PR commitments, unconditional and irrevocable patent terms.”

ENS Labs is ready to challenge this patent, which we think is entirely from our own inventions, a position we can demonstrate and intend to demonstrate, Johnson warned.

Matthew Gould, one of the so-called innovators of Unstoppable Domains, has responded to the controversy with an open invitation to join the Web3 Domain Alliance, a blockchain domain registrar that promises to enforce copyright. Gould argued that.

“I think the solution you proposed does not take into account the fact that we want to have many naming systems – not just ENS – and the only way to ensure the future is for everyone (not only UD and ENS) to have a place. Collaborate.”

Cointelegraph reached out to Unstoppable Domains, but didn't get an immediate response.

The thread has caught the attention of the crypto community. Bob Summerwill, executive director of the Ethereum Classic Alliance, pointed out that forcing organizations to join the Web3 Domain Alliance to secure rights to the technology is a direct attack on open source ethics.

“Also, Matt, this prior covenant is not the same as what we're talking about, because entities must ‘join the club' to benefit from the patent covenant. Anyone who doesn't comply and doesn't join is protected from patent rights. Your union.”

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