8mo ago

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.

58 comments

Did Spez trademark "im just a little shit pig" too?
- Explain Like I'm Steve "Jailbait" Huffman
  
  Did he actually defend that subreddit or is it more of a general “this happened and he didn’t do anything about it until he had no choice?”

Imagine the balls it takes to take user-created forum names and register them as trademarks.

Wasn’t ELI5 a line from the Office?
- Yup. That episode aired December 2008. r/explainlikeim5 was created in 2012. Can't tell when r/eli5 was created, as it's now private.
  
  Eli5 went private?!

If you needed any further proof that stock prices are mostly bullshit, check out the graph for RDDT.
It's interesting and depressing to me that reddit as a corporate entity is the antithesis of what 90% of active redditors would claim themselves to be. Yet they stay there and participate anyway.
- Kind of a metaphor for modern politics if you think about it. Not until people are getting drafted to fight for oil or fresh water will younger people give a shit and change a thing. "My vote doesn't matter." Vs. every single conservative person in their country showing up to vote as if their ill-gotten gains depend on it.
- Wow, reddit is actually up 23 percent year to date. Boy, if I needed any more evidence we were in an economic bubble than that....

I remember when r/natureisfuckinglit was created, it's relatively new sub, there was a cool photo on r/earthporn, some dude commented "nature is fucking lit", someone else commented there should be a sub for this and the next person created the sub
- That dude signed a contract, said anything he writes belongs to Reddit in all mediums and in perpetuity.
  
  I mean that would hardly hold up to a challenge fir inadequate consideration. The value of all intellectual property in perpetuity is easily worth far more than access to the reddit website.

Where does one mail a cease and desist for a non-centralized network?
- I assume you'd go to the owner of the instance that hosts that particular community.
  
  Torrents and Federated sites: they can't give us all a speeding ticket if we're all speeding
- To yourself.

RPAN (actual subreddit name is R/PAN but they messed up the word mark for the registration I think.)
They didn't mess up, it was called RPAN from the start. And that's something Reddit launched, so it makes sense they'd trademark it.

I don't even think most of these would hold up in court unless they add "r/" in front of them. Reddit reserves the non-exclusive right to use user content however they want, and I don't think this includes making user-submitted phrases their trademarks. I haven't read the ToS though so another clause might reserve this right too. There might be a claim to words like "subreddit", "r/" and "RPAN" and derivatives because they are based off the "Reddit" trademark.
- I'm sure the fine upstanding folks working so earnestly as corporate lawyers will think of something. :D

Nosleep is fucking podcast they can't own that name can they? Nor Shower thoughts and damn sure TIL.

Is it in the TOS somewhere that anything created or posted on their site essentially belongs to them?
- The POS are always in the TOS

I think they’d have a hard time defending some but not all of those. I’m sure many of the Redditors heavily involved in those subs, including the mods, have no idea, though!
- Sounds like a lawsuit that should definitely happen!

Wait.
The applications for "NOSLEEP" and "R/NOSLEEP" were filed by Reddit Inc in... August 3, 2018?
And "THE NO SLEEP PODCAST" by Creative Reason Media (the actual publishers of the podcast) was filed in August 5, 2016, but... got dismissed or abandoned?
...What?

58 comments