This is a joke thread, but I'll address the serious questions it raised.
ZK the game and ZK the Java framework are not infringing on each other's trademarks because they are in separate product spaces and have no risk of being confused for each other. The same is true for Zero-K the game and Zero-K the cooling wipes. If I wanted to, I could register "StarCraft" as a trademark for a line of chainsaws, a sports drink, an automobile, or a tax preparation service without infringing on Blizzard's trademark for their line of video games. Trademark protection is product-sector-specific.
[Note: It's not quite as simple as that. There are subtleties and complications which I am deliberately skipping over. However, the basic point is essentially correct for the discussion at hand.]
Trademark protection is an important concept for an open-source project such as ours, simply because the Zero-K brand and all associated trademarks are the only things which are definitively ours. That's because we've deliberately decided to give everything else away (subject to the standard open-source constraints such as share-and-share-alike). Someone else could duplicate everything there is about Zero-K and we could do nothing about it. That's a deliberate choice on our part. The one thing we
could do is require them to call themselves something other than Zero-K, because we have
not given away the rights to use our trademark the way we've given away the rights to use our code and artwork.
The same thing is true for pretty much all other open-source projects. The big ones have set up foundations to act as legal owners of the project's assets. They also usually serve as steering committees and policy makers; in some cases they also raise and collect funds and pay staff to advance the project's goals. But in most cases the only assets they have are the trademarks of the project's brands. And, in fact, that's the only legal lever they have to enforce whatever policies they decide to make. They also have a social lever, and that lever is much, much more powerful and important than the legal lever. But when the social control breaks down and people threaten to leave or fork the project over differences in policy, the foundation is the entity that determines which branch of the fork gets to keep using the old name and which branch has to switch names.
Trademark protection is not simple. Unlike copyright, you don't get it "for free" just by existing. To get any significant legal protection (i.e. the ability to force a competitor to stop using your trademark) you have to register the mark, and usually you have to register it in multiple jurisdictions separately using separate processes. Unregistered trademarks ("common-law trademarks") can also be legally protected, depending on the jurisdiction, but are usually harder to enforce, as the burden to show rightful use and ownership is higher.
Organizations such as The Mozilla Foundation, The Wikimedia Foundation, and the World Science Fiction Society have standing committees which deal with registering and maintaining their rights over their trademarks (such as the words "Firefox", "Wikipedia", and "Worldcon" and "The Hugo Awards"). [Note that the WSFS is about putting on conventions and giving out awards, not writing software, but they've been dealing with these sorts of trademark issues for much longer than the open-source movement has been in existence.] These efforts take up a modest amount of time, effort, money, and organizational resources. It's not a huge effort, but it's not nothing, and at this time it's certainly well beyond the capabilities of Zero-K.
At this time, there is no question that we are best off simply using Zero-K as an unregistered, common-law trademark and hoping that we never need to initiate a legal enforcement action to stop someone from making another game - or even the exact same game - and calling it Zero-K. I think we are pretty safe in that regard. The existing social structures should be more than sufficient to prevent that from happening. Nobody making a
different game would want to use this name (because they wouldn't want the confusion it would cause any more than we would), and nobody is going to want to fork
this game because it's not like we have more than a few people working on it in the first place. And anything calling itself "ZK" or "Zero-K" that isn't a game is irrelevant.
