Id Software is trying to prevent a thrash metal band from using the name “Doomscroll”.

It seems almost surreal that id Software is trying to stop Dustin Mitchell, a 38-year-old Amazon worker and guitarist from Dallas, Texas, from naming his new progressive thrash metal band Doomscroll. As Mitchell told Wired in an interview, he came across the term after reading a news report in which a woman referred to the urge to consume negative news on social media.

Mitchell thought it was an excellent name for a band he had been wanting to form and had started to see the name registered. He filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Still, when the guitarist was almost done with the process, he received an email from a lawyer representing id Software informing him that the company owned the Doom video game and related trademarks.

Id Software owns several trademarks related to the term “Doom“, which has led the company to file quite a few trademark appeals related to the term: just last month, the company filed objections to the terms “ODoom” and “Doomlings”. In the case of id Software, the interest relates to the commercial exploitation of the Doom universe.

In some cases, such as the appeal against the “Garden of Doom” podcast, the situation was resolved by a settlement agreement reached by lawyers out of court, which restricted the use, preventing the term from being used in films or video games. However, Mitchell will have to wait until 2023 to decide whether to continue his band under that name or start looking for another.

Source: Wired