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.

123 points

Did Spez trademark “im just a little shit pig” too?

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48 points

Explain Like I’m Steve “Jailbait” Huffman

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9 points

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?”

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16 points

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

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8 points
*

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.

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107 points

AM I THE ASSHOLE?

Yes.

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90 points

“You made this?”

“I made this.”

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52 points

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

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47 points

…Isn’t… “Explain Like I’m Five” an Office reference first?

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31 points

None of these would stand up to scrutiny in court.

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14 points

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.”

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1 point

I get the feeling that the US copyright is largely being operated on a pinky swear basis. For example - the current copyright on the original Bitcoin whitepaper is held by a well known con artist, simply because he was the first to register it.

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9 points

This.

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)

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9 points
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