Oh dear.

Drew, I know you may be temporary, but my love for you will be forever. Great stories this weekend.

When this happens, I don't wanna be the one that's gotta tell the whole internet of fanboys that their favourite phrase just got trademarked.

Seriously. The internet will explode or something.

Wow, that's a new level of stupidity!

Futuremark has a good reputation among the gaming community. Pulling crap like this will only destroy that.

I'm a evil company hater-boi, +1 to my list

Why don't they ban piracy while they're at it?

I like how they have to do this with "pwnage" rather than "pwn." I say that if this ridiculous piece of crap goes through, we should start saying "pwnaged," or "pwnageified," in order to genericize it as quickly as possible.

Pwned! lololo.

Does that simply mean no one else can make a movie, album, or game with the term "pwnage" in it?

Not that anyone really was in the first place...

Drew, keep up the awesome stories.

And pictures to go with them :D

¿Whats 1337 & hax04?

Smells like an Aprils fool prank in the making. I'm suspicious for anything these days.

Sorry, my bad. I'd just filed a motion against Futuremark Games Studio for violating my patent on breathing... I think they're retaliating.

By the way, folks, you're late with your royalties. Cough up.

-- Steve

Are people jumping on the "April Fools in March" bandwagon, then?

Wow. I've seen other Kotakuites comment about how totally amazing the pictures Drew posts are awesome, and up until now, I've thought: "They are, indeed, pretty good, but I don't need to waste people's time talking about it." But that picture... totally requires me to waste people's time talking about how awesome Drew's picture selections are.

spam i know, but the picture is from the zoo Duisburg in germany ^-^ where i live... i knew ive seen the pool somewhere

I'm sorry, but "pwn" came from a typical, nay, common typo, not some genius of wordplay. Notice how "O" and "P" are close together?

But if this bullshit case it allowed, then I call "teh."

What the hell? This stupid, how can this possibly be taken seriously by a court or anyone for that matter. If this does somehow go through the crazy judicial system and get passed the boys at Pure Pwnage might be in trouble, though im sure they would have more right to trademarking the word than these finnish bozos.

What dumb asses. How can you trademark a word that somebody else came up with. Isn't that kind of like stealing a baby then cloning the baby and selling the cloned babies to people.

Don't worry guys. He will be in for a surprise when he finds out I have already applied for a trademark on all vowels.

...laser disks?

@fadecy: Yes, it's just like selling cloned babies.

That say pwnage.

I'm trademarking the word trademark.

I'm going to get ahead of the curve on this one and trademark "d0uchage."

Too late...Comcast trademarked that a long time ago.

I hope their trademark gets denied just so I can e-mail them saying "You got pwned"

@ bluesquareapple

Yeah well before you do that I am going to trademark "Patent" and all its forms. So no one can file a patent ever again!

@invictus: IBM is doing that already. They are trying to patent how to make money from patents.

[www.breitbart.com]

I warned you all. It started with Pirates Vs. Ninjas, and I warned you.

If this is real, please insert an epic facepalm here, my guess is that its just an early April Fool's joke.

shennanigans! on Futuremark, get your brooms! (southpark reference if you didn't understand it..)

anyway, how can they tm a word that never really was a word?

well then, im gonna go tm the word "a", or just the letter "a", and every otehr vowel, so it will be impossible to make anything that doesnt require paying me

Now that its mainstream does that mean people will stop using it? God I hope so.

dwnage. also, qwnage.

LOL! That manatee pwned that chakkin' n00b!

Photoshop is a trademark, but it doesn't stop people using the word, usually as a verb. To quote Adobe:

CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.

They can't do anything to stop people using it that way though, photoshop is synonymous with image editing and enough people use it that way that they could never stop people misusing it, the same with Google now meaning "look it up on the internet".

Why is it always pwn? L, K, I, 9, and 0 are all next to O on the keyboard. lwnage? kwnage? iwnage? 9wnage? 0wnage? Well, I guess th last one works...

"i lwn all u nubs" could be the nxt big thing!

Awww I was gonna trademark that. Not really because that's lame.

Hmm, wonder how long it will take for anon on 4chan or any other chan to amass the army and attack.

First of all, don't we know who invented it? It was some guy on WoW, wasn't it?

Second, how the fuck do these idiot lawyers think they can stop an internet full of nerds from saying it to each other?

Third, why do they think they can make money by copyrighting it for movies and such? Is someone busy writing the script to "PWN: The Movie"?!

Ugh. Reminds me of Lionel Hutz imagining a world without lawyers.

No chance in hell will this be accepted. So don't worry. And if it is accepted, it will be appealed and it does not take long to see where the word originated

thats almost as bad as when paris hilton tried to trademark "thats hot" as a paris only phrase.

If this is actuly real then i have lost all faith in everything in the world and will make it my lifes mission to destroy the world because i dont want to get pissed off by how stupid people are anymore.

If its fake then PWNED.

most of the older retarded internet slang originated either on the counterstrike servers/forums or on IRC.

what a retarded idea for attention. whats next? leak a sex tape with paris hilton? good luck with that.

@PlayerX: wow?! no way jose. pwned was in full use the first time i turned on counterstrike - in like 1998.
from my understanding it comes from fps 1-hand-on-keyboard misspelling, you are aiming at writing 'owned' but because your hand has to travel from the mouse to the keyboard the first letter often ends up wrong: o is next to p (and it's your lame 4th finger hitting the o key).
this is funny. why bother? they can't really do anything with it.

Grah! They're not trying to trademark the word, obviously - do you not think that their lawyers would have said 'ummm, you can't do that?'

Note how it's the Futuremark Game Studio that's filed this - it's obvious that, if it isn't an April fool, it's obviously because they're protecting the name 'Pwnage' for a product. 10 points to anyone who connects 'game studio' and 'game product'!

Don't always jump to conclusions, folks!

@kutsurogu: no, do always jump to conclusions, folks!

Pwned.

...so what? Do they get a nickle or something?

Drew, you are on FIRE this weekend! Go man go!

Also, what a stupid idea it would be to trademark "pwned".

@Arteen:

Because pwnage looks more like ownage than kwnage. That looks like kwanage like kwan (from Jerry Maguire) or coin in the vernacular. So you might say something to your buddies like Hey dude, U got enuf kwnage for a couple of forties? Now if your buddy chugs down the 40, you would say Dude, U pwned that 40.

they didn't mention hd-dvd! where's their vision?

Okay, I'm going to skip all this nonsense and go right to trademarking the words "Cake", "Door", and "Car". Anytime anyone uses those without my permission... oy, there will be trouble.

Also, who would even bother to trademark something on laser disc anymore?

I want a nickle every time someone uses the word "The".

Does anybody even make laserdiscs anymore???

Hey they left Bluray free!

That's sad...

PWNAGE :D

Damn it all!
When will The Man cease getting at us with his nefarious schemes?

It's like that time The Man decided Jack Thompson should be on TV, or when he keeps on giving Uve Boll money.

Damn The Man!

"laser discs featuring movies about fictional characters"

People still use Laser Disks?

@DrunkMonkey: I just bought dr strangelove on laserdisc 2 days ago.

And the thing is, this stuff is only common on the interwebs®, so the registry peoples® don't know that they're common. To them, they look at these ungodly collection of letters and say "Those couldn't possibly be words like dog and cat and George Bush® and Onomatopoeia! They can be trademarked!"

Bullock's Bollocks®, I say.

You think THIS is stupid? These are just absurd internet fad words... Not, stupid is the companies that patented their genetically modified seeds, planted them on farmers that never used anything but their own seed, and sued those farmers into foreclosure. That has a bit more weight than whether we get to say "Lolz®" again.

Oh boy, just when I thought pwned! images couldn't get any funnier

@jarjarwang: laserdisc! retro charm!

When a judge shoots this down for the nonsensical bullshit it is there needs to be a bunch of gamers waiting on the courthouse steps to shout "pwned" at the company's lawyers as they leave the building.

Well, we still have 'prawnage.'

Prawned!

@Livid: I elect this term for standard usage.

great...now the word isn't cool anymore. What's the next word we can say?