Reddit gay gamers to fight Gaymer trademark

Or license it to them for $1. The subreddit can then put a (R) sign next to it and say "Used under license from Chris Vizzini / gaymer.org". With some ingenuity, Vizzini could work with them to turn it into a community brand and make gaymer.org the central hub. Trying to fight the community rather than work with it is inconceivable!

Well, the first part of the storm was quite a while ago when he first sent the C&D and it did make it to the front page. At the time he was running his site on a shared server. Needless to say, plenty of people visited his site and it was very quickly suspended by his provider. He tried to call it a DDOS attack and as I recall he had moved it to one of the providers that specializes in hosting porn sites and such that tend to get attacked a lot.

I'm guessing this has already cost him quite a bit of money, and if he ends up having to pay a lawyer to try and defend the trademark, it's going to get expensive very quickly. But some people would rather double down than accept that they might be better off letting something go.

he initially demanded the subreddit change its name, which is technically hard to do, or so people from reddit said, which would mean the subreddit was to be deleted.

he was never to be 'stripped' of something he built, the site and the subreddit have existed side by side for years. even if he loses his trademark, his site will continue to exist, and he's free to try and monetize that to his heart's content.

also, the sob-story about php and mysql sounds a bit off since he uses Invision Powerboard to host the whole site.

A trademark is a legal monopoly on a name. The issue isn't whether he worked hard or not, it's whether he deserves to have a legal monopoly on the use of the word "Gaymer". As much as you argue "he trademarked it plain and simple" these people have the right to say "we don't think there should be a legal monopoly on that word, plain and simple."

People should really think twice about what they try to remove from the public domain. It's a bit selfish and arrogant to think you can own words like "Gaymer".

> He trademarked it plain and simple and shouldn't be stripped of his trademark.

Not much about the law is 'plain and simple'.

Being granted a trademark isn't very good evidence that you should have been granted a trademark. Trademark offices don't do hours of exhaustive research into whether a mark has become customary, or whatever. They don't have the resources.

The idea is, if the trademark holder threatens someone with a trademark that shouldn't have been granted, the person being threatened will then do the research, and will apply to the trademark office to have the TM invalidated. They can then look at the application and decide. Shifts the effort from the trademark office to the parties. That's why trademark offices have process to apply to invalidate a trademark. Which /r/gaymers is using as intended.

Think of it like this: if /r/gaymers do prevail, then that means that, in the trademark office's opinion, they were wrong to have granted Vizzini the trademark in the first place. Which means that the "He trademarked it plain and simple" argument is meaningless: it's right if Vizzini ends up keeping his trademark, it's wrong if he ends up losing it.

And as others have pointed out: Being "stripped" of a trademark isn't a punishment. It doesn't stop you using it. It just stops you from using the law to stop other using it.

(N.B. IANAL, and in particular I'm only familiar with EU trademark law. I'd be surprised if US law was that different, but I don't know for sure, so the above may not be accurate for US law).

> Was the reddit group formed before 2007 ?

In early 2011, /r/gaymers had a mere 600 subscribers [1] so it was likely formed some time in 2010.

Custom subreddits were added in 2008 [2] which is thus the earliest possible point that /r/gaymers could have been founded.

However, there is certainly what I as a lay-person would call prior art.

There's a Yahoo! group for "gaymers" founded in 2000 [3].

    [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110226103548/http://www.reddit.com/r/gaymers
    [2] http://blog.reddit.com/2008/01/new-features.html
    [3] http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/gaymers/

If you don't know whose side to take in a trademark dispute, one heuristic is: default to whichever side is trying to get the trademark invalidated. Because getting a trademark invalidated doesn't stop you using it -- it just stops you from using the law to stop other using it.

BTW, the key point in trademarks isn't whether there's prior use, technically. It's whether there's customary use, and (independently) whether the mark is purely descriptive. Widespread prior use is just evidence of those. (N.B. that's in the EU - I assume US law is similar, but don't actually know).

> I noticed the other day my pillow has a trademark on the word "Jumbo". Where are the people getting upset about that?

People are getting upset of this because they identify as gaymers - it's something they are. The word gets tied up with the identity. So naturally they get upset if someone tries to (from their POV) take the word away from them.

It's a different "category". Like Apple (hardware) and Apple (records), it was okay for them to share the name until Apple (hardware) moved into the music business.

... wherein mr. vizzini is the hero who personally wrested the term 'gaymer' from the evil claws of the bigoted internet. there's enogugh references from before 2003 to prove that this is a load of bs.