PLAYING WITH THEMSELVES

Reddit’s Gaymer Community Under Threat From Copyright Infringement

The owner of gaymer.org has served Reddit with a cease and desist letter over the “Gaymer” subreddit community, claiming the name was trademarked in 2007 and  leading the subreddit’s over 16,000 subscribers worried that it may be shut down.

Reddit user MisterGhost published this announcement yesterday:

Someone wants to take gaymers from us. A cease and desist letter has been sent to Reddit. It would seem that the owner of gaymer.org is an incredible douchenozzle and has decided that we somehow are infringing upon his right to run a very subpar blog. Though Gaymercon seems to be A-OK. It seems pretty fucked up that they seem to be ok using the same GAYMER name, even though we aren’t making money. See what it is, is that this motherfucker from gaymer.org is sending reddit a cease and desist letter that we are using a name that he had trademarked in 2007 though whoever gave him that trademark is clearly not the brightest lightbulb in the box. It is a general term, not really sure how we fucking come into play.

While some gaymers are worried over losing the subreddit, others gamers — note the missing ‘y’ — don’t understand why there’s a need for a separate community at all. With next year’s Gaymercon easily surpassing its Kickstarter and garnering the support of Microsoft, however, there’s clearly a viable gay gaming community that wants to interact with one another, so why begrudge them that? Especially when there’s basically a subreddit for everything that ever happened anywhere at anytime.

The gaymers might have nothing to fear, however, as Reddit would most likely just change the name of the community, as stated in a reply to the announcement:

I informed the mod team of /r/gaymers that we’d received a cease and desist letter for infringement of the “gaymer” trademark and that our legal counsel had informed us that the letter presents a real threat that they would sue reddit. I let them know so that they could start planning how to respond (including seeing if there’s any way for them to work things out with the owner of the trademark).

In no way do we plan to ban the subreddits involved in this legal kerfuffle; at worst, we’ll have to rename the whole lot or figure out some other way to fix this. (Note that we haven’t really done big renames etc. before but this is a pretty unprecedented thing for us)

Hopefully gaymer.org and Reddit’s gaymers can learn to put their hands on each other’s joystick in solidarity.

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