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:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
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.
tdx3fan
Nerd RAGE! Nerds go boom! Maybe, this will cause some of the “gaymers” to go out and get a boyfriend and a life and some sun!
Captain proton
speaking as a nerd, gaymer.org is owned by:
Registrant Name:Chris Vizzini
Registrant Organization: Chris Vizzini
Registrant Street1:673 Boulevard NE
Registrant Street2:#4
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Atlanta
Registrant State/Province:Ga
Registrant Postal Code:30308
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.4048768113
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:[email protected]
who should probably (knowing the general nerd/geek community) invest in private domain name registration.
LandStander
When you try to go to the gaymer.org website now, it says the account has been suspended!
Captain proton
@LandStander: There has been a major upheaval in the internet.
godaddy.com which hosts millions of sites has been attacked and many sites are still down.
Even queerty was down for a while.