FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard

mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.

Comments

name change?

[d_strand]

why not just change the name?

Blizzard doesn't hold the rights to the whole RTS genre, if that was the case then C&C and AoE and lots of others would be in trouble..

just a little update!

[LuxFX]

C'mon guys, here's where you have the advantage because you can do something that big-shot software companies can't. Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game. re-release it as a "different game" and under a different company logo if you have to.

the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.

fly like a butterfly....
.

Re:What do they expect?

[Omnifarious]

So, why hasn't FreeCiv been sued out of existence then? Seems to me that there was some precedent to a game calling itself 'FreeSomething' and it being OK.

There was no chance of trademark confusion here.

Re:This is bad, but..

[LoadStar]

I can't feel too sorry for the FreeCraft people. Open source projects need to think of more creative and original names instead of just ripping off someone else's name and making a "clever" modification

Another project that frankly I'm surprised has made it this far is FreeVo - obviously a name in the same thought process as FreeCraft. I fully expected TiVo to crack down on them too.

I'm still unclear however. Was the main problem the name? It sounds like it, and if so, it was just a move to protect their trademark. If you don't defend your trademark (and those that may dilute your trademark) you lose it, so this Blizzard and their parent companies had to do this.

What isn't clear is why they didn't just change the name like Blizzard et al wanted and go on with life. Everyone is making it sound like Blizzard shut this project down, when it just looks like they wanted the name changed and the FreeCraft shut the project down all by themselves.

Sad.

[mikeee]

I made some very minor contributions to this a couple years ago; it's pretty much playable these days.

OTOH, I always thought it would have made more sense to build it as a generic engine, with at least one totally original theme, than a 100% clone of Warcraft mechanics. (In fairness, I think the plan was to move in that direction eventually).

But like a lot of these, probably 70% of the code was written by one guy, I think, so if they've chased him off the project is toast. :(

Victor's Secret

[drdale]

I am not a lawyer, but on the surface this case looks similar to one the Supreme Court just decided recently in which Victoria's Secret sued a sex-toy company called Victor's Secret for trademark infringement because of the soundalike name. Victoria lost---the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name. The CBS news story is here.

Re:What do they expect?

[CrazyDuke]

I expect trademark law to be used to protect the integrity of a specific brand, not to curb stomp anyone with a vaugely similiar idea off the market. "Freecraft" was just an engine so one could play Warcraft on Linux without emulation. It required the content off the original Warcraft CD's to be used in order to work. It is not like it was a competing game. Even with that considered, claiming the -craft suffix is as broad and overeaching as Microsoft's trademark on "Windows." This would be similar to Microsoft putting the axe in X-Windows for trademark violation.

Re:I'm wondering

[Dysproxia]

I have this old review of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans that says:

"Others steal toilet paper from their work place, others steal ideas from popular games. Toilet paper thiefs go to Hell, idea thiefs to sales charts, especially if they are as good as Blizzard with Warcraft"

Obviously, the game before Warcraft was Dune II from Westwood.

Re:"Plays Warcraft 2"

[thrift24]

We run this game all the time, and here's how it goes. For this game to be worth anything you HAVE to own one of the WarCraft II cds. Then once you have one of the cds you use a tool for the game that extracts the maps, graphics, and scenarios from the WarCraft II cd and skins the game to make it look and play very much like the original WarCraft II. I don't see why Blizzard has a problem w/ this considering the original WarCraft II doesn't work in many of the windows operating systems, and people still have to buy the WarCraft II cds from Blizzard. So those people using unsupported operating systems gets to play, and Blizzard gets to sell more of it's game...how is this a problem.

Also this game adds a lot of features beyond WarCraft II. There are a few additions to the actual game, like the ability to pump out critters from farms, but they have also dropped the original warcraft II network system(that involved using ipx and then kali to emulate tcp/ip) and gone straight to tcp/ip. The game also allows more people for network play, from the original 8 to now 16 and the map size has gone from 256x256 up to a possible 2048x2048.

We tried for quite a while to get WarCraft II working on bootable dos cds so that we could run our operating systems of choice and then boot up a cd to play warcraft, but dos netcard drivers suck. This is the only way we could easily set up WarCraft II for network play, and yes we own many copys of WarCraft II and the expansions.

It's sad to see Blizzard attacking such a good program. I hope that the people behind freecraft just put their foot down, don't rename the damn thing and just keep doing what they do well and contribute more code to the project. If worse does come to worse though they could just rename the game and actually get some usable artwork. Either way, when Blizzard shutdown bnetd i said I would never buy another Blizzard product, and I haven't...now I'm to the point where I just want to take MY WarCraft II cd, make an iso, and put it up on kazaa or gnutella....which I think I'll go do.

Its all bullshit anyways

[pr0c]

I've been somewhat involved in the project for a month or so now so I have slightly more insight than the average person. As far as i can tell their is no fucking letter. This letter was sent to an Xdeveloper who has not shown it to anyone. This same Xdeveloper owns the freecraft domains and as soon as he wasn't involved with the project any longer he put them up for sale... hmmm

Its all bullshit, there probably is no fucking letter. Any other project would have debated this and they would have posted the letter as well, i personally watched them just quit without discussion and fucking everyone else who was working on the project.

First FreeCraft, next...

[EvilAlien]

... StarCraft?

I know every time I see one of these these lumbering down the road I get confused and think maybe its a roving Blizzard expo, or promotional thing for the next installment of the tired ol' RTS genre.

I wish Blizzard et al would go after Starcraft RV too to protect me and all the other mindless drone comsumers from the risk of confusing two obviously different products with each other... what about Mastercraft boats, Chris*Craft boats, etc? Blizzard sure has a lot of work to do, I'm glad they are looking out for us easily confused consumers.

On a serious note, I think I'll stop buying Blizzard products all together. My entertainment dollars will go to a company with less intellectual property fascists on staff.