Bandaid is trademarked and people use it all the time, xerox too.
Was the reddit group formed before 2007 ?
I noticed the other day my pillow has a trademark on the word "Jumbo". Where are the people getting upset about that?
Oh I see now from the EFF release:
As today's petition notes, the term "gaymer" had been in widespread use for years before Vizzini applied for a trademark. In fact, there's even a GaymerCon conference.
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.
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/That's obviously where he got the domain name idea then and did a trademark the following year.
Remember the days when you could find a word that wasn't registered as a domain?
Even the fact he went for the .org leads me to believe the .com had to be in use already. Yup, registered and paid parking since 2002. Interesting he didn't bother to try to use the trademark to grab the .com
You can claim a trademark as long as no one else has already claimed the same name in the same context. Once you have established the trademark, you can prevent others from using that name, even if they have been using it for a long time.
Note that the "same context" is why there's unlikely to be a conflict with Gaymers Cider. In particular, the gaymer.org trademark only applies to social networks.
(IANAL, so I may have some details wrong here.)
You can prevent others from using it in the field the trademark was registered for to identify a product or service not approved by the trademark holder.
Most statements of trademark law being ridiculous for allowing people to "own" common words hinge on ignorance of these details.