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Comment by gabemart | Hacker News Reader

> 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/

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Ah well then no trademark should be allowed then.

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

Prior art is irrelevant for trademarks -- a trademark doesn't have to be unique for you to use it. There was an item called a "macintosh" before the name Macintosh was trademarked. The word "dropbox" had been used in file sharing software long before the YC startup existed. Even the creator of gaymer.org doesn't claim to have invented the word "gaymer."

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.)

> 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.

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.

It says in the sidebar "a community for 2 years".

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