this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 120 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Did Spez trademark "im just a little shit pig" too?

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Explain Like I'm Steve "Jailbait" Huffman

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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?”

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

I like to err on the side of caution and assume that he contributed CP, just to be safe.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

He was added as a mod pretty much for shits and giggles, he didn't do any actual moderation. Still, he allowed the sub and many others like it, so very much the second option.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 10 months ago

AM I THE ASSHOLE?

Yes.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 10 months ago

"You made this?"

"I made this."

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (3 children)

IANAL can anyone ELI5 do they have to try and defend these trademarks? And how would that look like, going after Lemmy communities for using TIL, etc?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

my understanding (I'm just a tax guy, my brother's the IP guy) is they have to defend the trademark or they lose it to genericism and saran wrap [edit fuck it's cellophane]. I could be wrong though.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Wouldn’t these terms being commonly used there and other places like quora, X/twitter, lemmy, etc show that they are already common terms that aren’t viable as brand identifiers of Reddit itself? Which is what trademarks are for. To reduce brand confusion and ensure people can identify a product, good and/or service and know it’s from a source they associate it with.

E.g. Coca Cola is a good example of what you think of when you see the red can, the swirl, and the font with the lettering.

You see it and you know what you’re getting quality wise, etc.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

yeah, it's why they shouldn't have been granted as trademarks, but what do I know I'm not an IP guy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Want a hoot? Go search for coke: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results It's pretty fun.

Most aren't for soda, since you aren't going to confuse slag with a drink.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Could simply be a case of protecting their largest assets incase someone big really did try to replace reddit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

IANAL

IANAL is a registered trademark of Reddit and Advance Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wasn’t ELI5 a line from the Office?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Eli5 went private?!

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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....

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

That dude signed a contract, said anything he writes belongs to Reddit in all mediums and in perpetuity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Time to switch to Explain Me Like I'm Six then

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Explain like im still a redditor

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Where does one mail a cease and desist for a non-centralized network?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I assume you'd go to the owner of the instance that hosts that particular community.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Torrents and Federated sites: they can't give us all a speeding ticket if we're all speeding

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago
  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

One more reason I'm done with Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Can't you just put /My website name after ?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is it in the TOS somewhere that anything created or posted on their site essentially belongs to them?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

The POS are always in the TOS

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Oh yea, I remember that site. You guys still getting emotional over it? Give it a clean break. The shit's poison. I know I shouldn't talk about an ex because people often get back together, but you can do it.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is in a community specifically on the subject of Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Lol, my bad. I should have looked at that. No wonder there's no humor on what I said.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Well, you can block this community now. It's the reason why [email protected] and others exist, to offload posts on annoyingly frequently discussed topics from general communities like [email protected].

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