history lesson on
$doge IP;
Doge’s owner never got IP rights to the coin, and nothing about the coin was illegal.
The IP timeline. Atsuko Sato, a kindergarten teacher who adopted Kabosu in 2008, has always held the copyright on the original 2010 photos — that never transferred. When Markus and Palmer launched Dogecoin in December 2013, they just used the meme. No license agreement, no payment, no deal. Dogecoin is decentralized and has no owning company, so there was never an entity that could have signed an IP agreement.
On “illegally.” Unlicensed use of a copyrighted photo is a civil matter, not a crime, and Sato never sued anyone. More importantly, a token’s price has nothing to do with its logo’s licensing status — DOGE ran because of retail speculation and Musk’s posts, not because anyone laundered IP into value.