The trademark is in the public domain which means it can never be sold. A company such as Oracle acquiring Joyent (and thus owning NodeJS) is a very realistic possibility, if not inevitable. You don't need anyones permission to use "iojs". You may use it for a book title, conference, training course, or service without needing permission or paying anyone to use it.

iojs follows an open governance model which means that large US corporations have equal input to everyone else on the direction iojs heads. Not any more or any less.

Edit: I would like to clarify that my opinion is not in any way based on Joyent not fulfilling their duty to the public. I am a former employee at Joyent and I have nothing but respect and praise for the work they have done WRT NodeJS. I hope to see NodeJS continue to thrive under Joyent's guidance. That said, I am supportive of an open initiative that iojs is attempting to achieve. I believe there are some long term benefits to having a release that is completely sheltered from any corporate initiative. My view is not meant to be antagonistic toward Joyent nor any of the NodeJS contributors.

As a recent convert to Node who switched to it because I thought we'd be closing in on 1.0 this year and instead got ... crickets. For my part, "pulling more regularly from V8" is enough all by itself.