U.S. court system: "Providing a trademark for these would be an instance of gross negligence and general abuse of copyright law to provide a corporation with no genuine claim to these references carte blanche use and legal guarantee of sole ownership of them. So we're going to do that because we're functionally an engine of capital and not actually a mechanism of justice."
You can try to trademark a lot of things, doesn't mean it will hold, especially if there have been prior uses (which there have been for just about all of them)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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!
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?
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.
Gotta say - regardless of which community we’re on, this informative post raises valid and interesting questions about important laws in the United States.