DISCLAIMER: I work for Joyent, and I can speak for the company but this is not legal advice.
My personal understanding of trademark law is that it is within a given domain. If you use "Node" in place of "Node.js" but are clearly talking about "Node.js" then you might be infringing on the trademark.
However, it is not our intention to stop anyone from doing open source or business using Node. We'd love to give you a free license to use the mark, please email "trademark [at] joyent [dot] com".
Our intention here is to make sure there are some protections against bad sports. People doing good legitimate work with Node is awesome and we want to encourage that. Mostly we need to do this thing with lawyer so if some hypothetical organisation in the future tried to do something bad and call it Node.js we can stop them. We don't want people to misrepresent a product as Node.js when it isn't, and damage the good name of the Node community.
trademark [at] joyent [dot] com is the best place for questions but you are welcome to reach out to me directly too. I'm tom [at] joyent [dot] com or @sh1mmer on Twitter.
Thanks for your response. I have no doubts that Joyent have good intentions. I'm not a member of Node.js community, so don't take this as me personally (or my company) having an issue with Joyent trademarking the name.
I understand that creating a company with the name "Node Consulting, Inc." that provides Node.js consulting services may create confusion. But why forbid the use of term in the domain name without agreement? For example, Python's trademark policy (http://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) says that you can't name your company "The Python Company", but they have nothing here about domains.
I honestly thought that real normal english words could not be trademarked (scottish law). I think I'll trademark the word Hacker if no-one else has... You'll all owe me a fortune!
They would be able to prevent you from using "nodeconsultingservices" to provide consulting services for Node.js, but I suspect they won't try to sue people who just coincidentally have Node in their name, especially if they predate the trademark filing or the project itself. The word "node" is simply a noun, in wide use across a number of disciplines above and beyond computer science, and they can't just grab it wholesale. Think "Microsoft Windows"; the fact that it is trademarked up the wazoo has not prevented the use of the term in its preexisting manners.
That's what I was wondering too. My business name is Leftnode Software, my domain is leftnode.com, I've gone by the moniker leftnode for a while now (from before node.js development started, I believe). I hope that was just a typo in their document and they meant nodejsconsultingservices.com would not be allowed.
Node is a common word. I would fight them to the death if they sued me over nodecode.com (which someone has already private registered). IMHO, this is just a precursor to a sellout.
Examples of things which are not nominative fair use and not permitted without a license:
• Use of a trademark in a domain name (e.g., nodeconsultingservices.com)
They trademarked "Node.js", but claim that having "node" in your domain requires a license?
Edit: BTW, I have registered this domain.