Item — HN Reader

I side with Vizzini on this one. He trademarked it plain and simple and shouldn't be stripped of his trademark. I hope the Reddit community members lose this one.

It's not like the guy demanded they stop using the term, he even let them use his trademark on their subreddit. But for some people that's just not enough.

Best wishes to Vizzini.

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> "The issue I have is when the Gaymer name is used. It takes 10 years of my work, money, blood, sweat and tears and directs it to another website. Trust me, there were many tears. When you have no idea about PHP/SQL and you have to figure out how to fix a database, you will end up in tears."

Yeah, I'd be pissed if some random internet mob wanted to strip me of something I built.

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3 comments

> 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).

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".

Completely agreed. It was incredibly selfish of Bill Gates to trademark "Windows", just like it was arrogant for Steve Jobs to trademark "Apple". I eat apples all the time! I look out windows all the time! These trademarks offend me.

These words should not be trademarked. Plain and simple.

Sarcasm doesn't make a poor comparison into a good one.

The arguments for invalidity here are: (1) generic use, that 'gaymers' is in customary use in online communities to mean a gay gaymer, and (2) descriptiveness, that it's a combination of two descriptive words that are both characteristics of the relevant class (i.e. communities of gay gaymers).

Neither of those is true of "Apple" for computers. Both'd be true of "Apple" for apples (i.e. the fruit) -- so if Apple started selling fruit, they wouldn't be able to register "Apple" as a trademark for that class of goods.

"Windows" arguably is descriptive of MS's OS, though not as strongly as "gaymers" is for gay gamers. Thing is, "Windows" now has acquired distinctiveness: everyone associates it with Microsoft's operating system, as opposed to other systems which also use windows. That gets around descriptiveness (and customary use). That's not true for gaymers: "gaymer" clearly isn't exclusively associated in the average gaymer's mind with Chris Vizzini's site (as opposed to /r/gaymers, or just gay gamers in general).

(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).

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.