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.
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 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!
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.
- RPAN (actual subreddit name is R/PAN but they messed up the word mark for the registration I think.)
They didn’t mess up, it was called RPAN from the start. And that’s something Reddit launched, so it makes sense they’d trademark it.
Imagine the balls it takes to take user-created forum names and register them as trademarks.
…Isn’t… “Explain Like I’m Five” an Office reference first?
None of these would stand up to scrutiny in court.
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.”
