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Penny Arcade - Comic - Royalties
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Royalties
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Well not honesty.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I can even see that being the line he used to pick up his wife.
If I remember right, when it was clear they were going to lose a copyright case, they tracked down a prior art that the plaintiff may have violated, bought it, and then exerted THAT copyright to shut down the one they'd violated.
King does honesty backwards.
@Skull2185 I think the story Hevach is referring to went like:
If correct, that's sadly not the first time I've seen something like that happen in the gaming industry.
Here's the story. I was fuzzy on most of the details, but the basic gist is there.
In 2008, a game called Candy Crusher came out. In 2010, a game called Candy Swipe came out. In 2012, King made a game called Candy Crush Saga. All are functionally the exact same match-3 fall down puzzle game with candy themed tiles. Candy Swipe filed the relevant trademark, and was successfully blocking King from getting one. So King tracked down and bought Candy Crusher and sued to get Candy Swipe's trademark revoked.
Also kind of impressively crafty...
I am not a lawyer, but everything I've read says that yes, trademark enforcement is compulsory if you want to hold onto yours (whereas copyright holders can choose whether to enforce on a case-by-case basis). However I don't believe a generic term like saga showing up in someone else's trademark needs to be challenged to hold onto your full 'tm'. I would have thought it would need to be something more specific to their brand identity, such as including a candy reference. Otherwise Star Wars and Star Trek (and many other Star IP's) couldn't each be trademarked.
King has a trademark on the word Saga. They were weeking one on Candy, but ended up settling for just ruining Candy Swipe's. This is much like Bethesda's trademark on Scrolls, in that it's bullshit designed to hurt studios too small to effectively fight back, while hiding behind the compulsory enforcement rule.
The thing about compulsory enforcement, if you don't think you're being violated, you don't need to attack just for the sake of attacking to defend your trademark - Monster (the cable maker) has been tossed out of court many times for that, being told they had no grounds for many of the lawsuits they've brought. When you later go to shut down the guy making Eldest Scrolls III: Tomorrowind and the judge says, "But you didn't vigorously enforce your trademark against that game Scrolls!" you can argue, "Because there was no cause to expect customer confusion with that product and it did not constitute a clear attack on our brand. We feel this game does." Compulsory defense does not mean you need to waste the court's time sorting out every similar name or word overlap.
Yeah, it's stupid that he was granted a trademark on a single, common word. So blame the government I guess.
Same with Monster cables. They got either a trademark or copyright, not sure which, on the word Monster and immediately sued Monster.com (a job search website from the long ago times). Then they got real cocky and trademarked the RCA connector, which is so named because RCA invented the damn thing. They sued anyone else making cables with that connector, which would be everyone making audio/video cables. That got stopped when they sued Blue Jeans Cable, a small time cable maker who happened to be a retired lawyer that specialized in copyright law. He documented the whole thing, posted it all over the internet, everyone had a good laugh.
[/trivia]
This reminds me I need to invent a project to buy more Blue Jeans cables.
That's why trademark enforcement is compulsory whereas copyright is up to the IP owner. If you let another entity use your trademark without a license, then it is no longer a distinct identifier for your business from a consumer perspective, so you shouldn't be able to stop any other entities from using it, or so the theory goes. If Monster cable has legal protection on the name "monster", that's a trademark.
Since copyright is just to protect your ability to profit from a concept, if someone else makes fan art or has a throwaway reference to it in their work ("You do too much, you're not Superman you know"), you don't have to go after them because it's not hurting the public perception of your product. But, if you're a company like Disney or Nintendo, who put a lot of effort into maintaining a family-friendly image, then you will probably want to go after certain kinds of fan art to try and prevent them from coming up in search engine results kids or uninformed parents might accidentally find (hence why, say, a certain website refers to Overwatch as Overlook). And of course, if someone tries to make and distribute (let alone sell) something similar to what you might have done with the concept, then they are directly impeding your ability to make money off it (hence why many fan games get C&D'ed, supposedly people might choose to hold off on buying an official product and just play the knock-offs). Naturally, publicly distributing copies of a copyrighted work without the holder's permission is right out, since that could prevent them from monetizing what they already created.
Patents need to exist to make it worthwhile to research and develop new things, but I don't know how much discretion the holder has in protecting it. Presumably it would be like copyright, in that once you have the patent it's good until the time runs out, no matter how many other people manage to copy it.
I actually have this bookmarked because this belief comes up so often. EFF says no, you don't have to go full police mode for trademark.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not-require-companies-tirelessly-censor-internet