(Links to images & videos below)
RE:
I want to start off by saying that I’m deeply sorry to my friends who have caught flack for being associated with me and to Complexity for not seeking their council beforehand. Also, sorry for the delay, it takes time to clear your head to write/source something like this. I never expected that taking what seemed to be good legal advice would end up with me here. I’d like to give my side of the story.
To Preheet: I am genuinely sorry for the stress I caused due to my lack of communication. I felt like you were not acting with good intentions. I see now I escalated the situation and instead of communicating with you, I got defensive. I used that to justify taking legal action and was wrong to do so before we spoke.
I took it way too far. I cringe when I think about how I’ve treated you because I know it comes from my own insecurities. You don’t have to forgive me. It is my intention to cease any legal action and figure out a way to coexist by talking it through with each other. I hope you will accept this olive branch.
Please let me explain why I did it.
Trying to create a business includes legal stuff like trademarks, llcs, cpas. Regardless of how people online feel about this, it’s important to note how easy it is to be detached with how people might react to something when you are talking over the logistics for protecting your livelihood in a legal setting. This is especially true if you mistrust the person on the other side. Laws on Trademark and DMCA suck. It’s overwhelmingly complicated and leaves you trying to make sure you check all the boxes but sometimes you lose sight of the human on the other side.
Please keep this in mind as you read.
The following block of information and screenshots are easy to look up. I will give Preheet the benefit of a doubt about him posting this. I can’t claim to know his intent, just as he can’t claim to know mine. Since I already have the trademark, none of this is relevant for the C&D. Preheet himself is who brought up these points, in his twitlonger as part of his story, and I am responding to them.
When I first started getting serious in WoW I was playing in a guild I had run for years, and was moving on to a way better guild in terms of rankings. This choice ended up being one of the most important ones I made in my life, as the guild I joined <TM> was where I first met Max and Tagzz and everyone else I ended up making connections with that eventually led me to Limit. The competitive environment of a top guild is what motivated me to get into twitch/youtube and start producing content.
Here is Preheet’s own date validation screenshot from his twitlonger (seen below).
Here is the link from the screenshot.
Here is a screenshot of my own video dashboard showing the exact same information for my channel.
If you don’t like screenshots you can also just visit my youtube channel and sort by date to confirm this for yourself.
Below is a screenshot from reddit where I promote my stream and youtube channel.
This is what it shows when you mouse-over the time.
(A link to this reddit post can be found here.)
Again, from Preheets twitlonger:
I don’t want to dwell too long on this, but I feel it’s pretty important. Due to the wording Preheet used I think he’s technically correct. Even so, it isn’t the whole picture.
Around the time I made this reddit post I decided to document some information about my wow character just in case I even suddenly “got big” online. It was a bit silly to think about at the time, but I had a goal in the back of my mind to try and make a career from WoW.
Here is a screenshot I took from the now decommissioned website “wowtrack” back in 2012.
Direct link here: https://i.imgur.com/Ec6OnV7.jpg
I’m the green dot. Ignore the other colored dots, I used wowprogress to try and make sense of who might be who at the time.
I didn’t spend much time in tmsean’s guild Team Malice (later <Gamble>) but I did make some good connections. Since it was one of the best guilds in the US, I felt pretty good about my ability to compete at a high level.
Here is a screenshot of the wow armory I took in 2013. I specifically took this screenshot to show how many more Preheats were around after my short stint in <TM> because I was proud of myself. A lot of people suddenly started liking the name and it seemed to be getting more popular (especially to mages). In my mind, the content I was producing coupled with my high rank was the main reason why people were suddenly taking a liking to the name. Just two years prior I was the only max level with the name and now there were at least 3 (on NA servers).
Today there are far more at max level (obviously). The point I’m trying to illustrate is that I don’t mind people choosing the name for their wow character, in fact I think it’s really cool when people do it. The issue I have is when I know that there is confusion over the name, specifically when it comes to online content creation like twitch/youtube/etc. Trademarks are literally used to help keep this sort of confusion from happening. They fall under a class. A trademark like mine is specific in what areas it protects me (entertainment services and gaming).
Here’s a screenshot from my trademark showing the class it falls under.
Since confusion over a name is one of the main ways a trademark is used to protect the holder, if there is indeed confusion (spoiler, yes there is) and I don’t do anything about it then it greatly weakens my claim to my own trademark.
I could probably fill a whole 10 pages of screenshots like this but I think you get the point. This is also true for Preheet’s channel as well. I constantly steer people in the right direction to Preheet if they are looking for his content and clarify to my viewers who I am. Preheet literally does the same on his channel. If there wasn’t so much confusion there wouldn’t be a need for chatbots that clarify who is who.
Around 2016 I remember being annoyed because people kept @’ing me in discord to complain about videos that didn’t belong to me. Even though some people knew who was who, I still felt like I was catching flack.
It’s around this time that I started getting harassed by strangers about the name. I could deal with having to constantly remind people who I am, but the trolling was really getting to me.
Because of this, the relationship between Preheet and I quickly became nasty and I felt constantly that he wasn’t acting with good intent. I would talk about him but never reach out. In hindsight this was due to my own insecurities. In 2018 Preheet and I had the following exchange.
Preheet was reaching out with good intentions and I genuinely responded from the heart in the moment, expressing my discontent. When the conversation was over I looked at the screen and just cringed. I cringed at myself for being vulnerable. I cringed at myself for not being more assertive. I cringed at myself especially for the terrible puns I made at the end. I wished that I could change what I had said, so I muted the conversation and closed it.
Over the years not much changed. I continued to do my thing and Preheet continued to do his thing with very little interaction. I complained about him privately and even sometimes on stream.
Getting world first in N’zoth was one of the best experiences of my life. My emotions were all over the place after our victory and I was so excited for the future of my team and my channels.
The growth of my twitch was off the charts at the time but my youtube wasn’t really doing well. Almost everyone else in the guild was seeing growth and I was frustrated why it seemed like my youtube was getting ignored. All of my other platforms like twitch twitter were exploding but youtube wasn’t moving. The thought that it might be due to the confusion over Preheet and my name made my stomach turn.
I checked on Preheet’s twitch channel and was shocked to see so many messages congratulating him for World First. Here is one screenshot as an example.
It’s hard to make out, but the date is on preheet’s taskbar: 2020-02-06
Then, Preheet uploaded his 2nd version of his 8.3 guide. For me at the time, this was way too coincidental.
The video had a lot of comments about world first and Limit that have since been deleted. At the time I got questions about the video and I still do, intermittently. Here is one example.
Here are statistics for my twitter, leading up to and following our world first Ny'alotha.
(source: https://socialblade.com/)
Here are statistics for Preheet’s twitter, leading up to and following our world first Ny'alotha.
Here are statistics for my Youtube channel, leading up to and following our world first Ny'alotha.
Here are statistics for Preheet’s Youtube channel, leading up to and following our world first Ny'alotha.
I think these statistics speak for themselves.
Here is a screenshot of Preheet’s twitch bio.
On a surface level he was differentiating himself but he just so happened to have all the right words so that “World 1st” Guild in his bio in bold. I might have been looking into this too much but it seemed like perfect SEO (search engine optimization) to drive clicks to his twitch for people who search for me. This could be completely coincidence, but I felt it wasn’t at the time.
In April Preheet came out with an April fools video about him changing his name. At the end of the video he adds a scene ment to troll me. The video is unlisted now but you can view it here:
Skip to 2:20 for the scene.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Tt0eLuDYPWxos1vK4Zp9vTyHWCkENn9/view?usp=sharing
I consider this the tipping point when it came to judging Preheet’s intentions. I did not like or trust him, and it came out on multiple occasions in clips on stream. I realized if I was going to make gaming a career for myself, I would need to confront this. I was recently laid off (due to corona). In May I started working on getting the trademark for Preheat and forming an LLC with my wife Brittany.
This is also around the time I checked back in on my DM’s with Preheet (which I had previously muted for years) and noticed that he had posted examples of how he was trying to lessen confusion between him and myself with discord bots and disclaimers.
Why would I think this person has good intent? Why would I trust them not to come after me? Here is a sound byte that was sent to me from someone who said that Preheet was thinking about trademarking as well:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XRR_F2aLtGRYCxO4cgBu50p_xvSH3D2l/view?usp=sharing
I didn’t buy any of it. Re-reading our exchange on discord and re-experiencing the cringe (my own cringe) I immediately started deleting messages. To keep the same overall intent of the exchange the same, I added “Please change your name” in parentheses.
In Preheet’s twitlonger, he claims that I am being deceptive but the sentiment of the exchange was the same: I was explaining my dissatisfaction with us both having the name. Regardless, this point isn’t relevant from the legal side. Who could I possibly be misleading if I didn't share screenshots of this conversion with anyone? I’m a discord admin, I know that edited messages show the date. If I wanted to change the message why would I add the words at the end and draw attention to them with punctuation?
Also, I knew for a fact that Preheet had screenshots of every exchange with me because he often talked about it.
Here’s a clip of him showing examples on stream.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tvNUogrF-e-OKpkXUUTlyJtw3zXN_tzw/view?usp=sharing
In September my trademark was successfully registered with the USPTO and following the advice of my lawyers I sent out a C&D immediately after.
Regardless of what you think about me you have to acknowledge that up until now two people making content for Mages in World of Warcraft using a name for their twitch/youtube that is phonetically the same is confusing. Even a max level twitch chat lawyer has to admit this, although it still makes me cringe when I think about how far I took this. Due to how public this all has become I seriously doubt people will confuse us in the future, though.
I sent the C&D to try and protect my own business because I mistrusted Preheet and didn’t think he had good intent. If you have read this in full then you have seen the examples yourself. Make your own decision.
There are always two sides to every story. I don’t care if people forgive me, all I want is to give context to what led up to the trademarks and the C&D and to explain my side.
Preheet, once again I want to apologize for the grief my lack of communication has caused you. No matter what, the tldr of this story is that I escalated the situation and instead of communicating with you and became a C&D andy. Hopefully now that you have the full story, you can understand why. Once again, it is my intention to cease any legal action and figure out a way to coexist by talking it through with each other.
I’m not sure what I want to do moving forward. I’m still figuring that out, but I’d like to thank those closest to me again. Thank you to my real life friends for being there when I needed you most. Thank you to my community for waiting patiently to hear my side of the story before rushing to judgement. The biggest thank you of all goes out to my wife Brittany who helped me keep my sanity in the past week. You could be the only person left in this world who loves me and life would still be worth it.
This screenshot was sent to me with no context, but I’m including it for Asmongold’s chat.
