Shocking News: Reddit has trademarks for forum names like "Explain Like I'm Five" registered on USPTO.
Shocking News: Reddit has trademarks for forum names like "Explain Like I'm Five" registered on USPTO.
I thought stuff like "Explain Like I'm Five" and "AMA" was proprietary to the community, or at least the Reddit community, not Reddit as a company.
I checked and I found at least those subreddit forum names were registered as trademarks.
- TODAY I LEARNED (TIL)
- SHOWERTHOUGHTS
- EXPLAIN LIKE I'M FIVE
- NOSLEEP
- AM I THE ASSHOLE?
- IAMA
- RPAN (actual subreddit name is R/PAN but they messed up the word mark for the registration I think.)
- ASK REDDIT (makes sense since this includes Reddit's name.)
- NATURE IS FUCKING LIT (I thought you couldn't register word marks with swearing but I guess I'm wrong. Must be only for offensive terms then...)
- ASK ME ANYTHING (yes somehow this "generic term" is a trademark now...")
- AMA
- ELI5
Also they have some trademark registration applications for WALLSTREETBETS that have not been finalized yet.
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....Isn't.... "Explain Like I'm Five" an Office reference first?
None of these would stand up to scrutiny in court.
U.S. court system: "Providing a trademark for these would be an instance of gross negligence and general abuse of copyright law to provide a corporation with no genuine claim to these references carte blanche use and legal guarantee of sole ownership of them. So we're going to do that because we're functionally an engine of capital and not actually a mechanism of justice."
I get the feeling that the US copyright is largely being operated on a pinky swear basis. For example - the current copyright on the original Bitcoin whitepaper is held by a well known con artist, simply because he was the first to register it.
This.
You can try to trademark a lot of things, doesn't mean it will hold, especially if there have been prior uses (which there have been for just about all of them)
Unexpected !dundermifflin@lemm.ee