Marvel Sues City of Heroes Makers

Walkiry (and many, many others) writes "In yet another copyright bickering lawsuit, Marvel is suing NCSoft and Cryptic Studios over their MMORPG City of Heroes due to copyright infringement, apparently because of the costume creator. "Marvel argues that the game's character creation engine easily allows players to design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including 'The Incredible Hulk'. Marvel seeks unspecified damages and an injunction against the two companies to stop using its characters." There are quite a few people suspicious that this is nothing but an effort by Marvel to undermine Cryptic Studios' successful game to prepare for the launch of their own comic book based MMORPG." USA Today has the story as well.

Comments

Re:Oh noes!

[dykofone]

I was looking for a way to give Marvel some credit here, being that I've never seen the CoH character creation interface. Maybe there's presets that look all too close to Marvel characters? Certain outfits that are almost identical? I'd be like Bic making a stamp in the shape of Hulk or Wolverine: while you're still putting it on paper, Bic made it that much easier for you to recreate Marvel's IP.

And then I read this:

The New York-based company also took issue with the ability of players to go so far as to name their superhero creations after Marvel comic book characters.

And realized Marvel is completely out to lunch on this. They claim that CoH is infringing IP because they didn't disallow people from typing in the specific, trademarked names? Should CoH keep a database of every trademarked name and lock them out as character names? "Sorry, you can't be Kroger, that name is already taken."

Re:Oh noes!

[Kierthos]

Well, the Terms of Service specifically forbid using any name for a character that is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. by a third party, with loss of your account as a penalty for doing so anyway.

Mind you, when I first started playing, there were a lot of comic-book clones, but they are extremely rarer now because most players, it seems, would rather make something that is uniquely theirs rather then be the 18th or 63rd Tick rip-off.

Kierthos

This isn't about just the tool

[thenerdgod]

Back when we were all creating our characters for our Communist supergroup, we had a bit of a back-and-forth with Cryptic over who, exactly, owned our ideas, especially if the characters we used were ideas we wanted to turn into a comic, or based on existing ideas we had used in a comic.

It came down to the EULA which states that your character and all derivations or representations thereof are property of Cryptic and NCSoft. To which I asked pointedly "What about the Fantastic Four?"

This was going to bite them in the ass eventually, as they allege to own everything you create, even if it's not yours to create.

My suspicion, as I've voiced elsewhere, is that they will be required to remove these characters from the game, and pay damages to Marvel, and probably DC and whoever else, in the end.

Then, of course, there's the obvious ownership issue of this guy.

Re:A new low.

[UWC]

The character creation process in CoH allows a LARGE amount of customization. When I created my character, there were no pre-set costumes or color schemes. You choose your origin, power types, and so on, a mix and match type deal. There's no particular "Hulk" power/appearance set to choose, though with the customizability I can see the allure of mimicking your favorite hero's power sets when you can.

Then you pick your character's appearance. There are a few body types including big bulky monster-sized guys (which I assume Marvel has not trademarked, Hulk being a Jekyll/Hyde homage/retelling already), which don't start out green or with purple pants. Again, there are people who use the engine's customization options to mimic their favorite hero, and of course the ones with simpler costumes (e.g. the Hulk wears... purple pants) are significantly simpler to copy than many other characters, the in-game copies of which are recognizable mainly because Marvel, DC, etc. have indeed done great jobs with making their trademarked costumes universally recognizable to the point where the in-game copes, which often have to improvise with incorrect patterns, equipment, and so on (because CoH does NOT actively try to allow creation of already trademarked characters) are still recognizable as the homages that they are.

Re:A new low.

[Babbster]

There are no "macros" per se. What happens during CoH costume creation is that you have three basic skeletons (male, female and "huge"), three body areas (head, upper body and chest) and multiple areas within those three areas to customize the look. Now, you can create, say, a character that looks exactly like Hulk by giving him the huge skeleton, green skin and hair, the closest face available and purple pants - that would be the absolute easiest ripoff to pull. You could make Cyclops by choosing the partial mask or mask with hair, a visor and his blue/yellow costume (with some tech accoutrements depending on which era you're shooting for) - again, a very easy one. The more complicated costumes could take a lot of time to build but you can get close to most of them.

Of course, all that being said, NCSoft does NOT provide templates for making ripoff characters easily (like being able to choose "Wolverine yellow/blue" or "Wolverine brown") and a player has to go to some effort to make a ripoff character - in most cases, it would be far easier to make an original design. Further, they specify in the terms of service that ripoff characters are not permitted, and when they are reported/caught they are forced to change names and/or costumes.

I don't know if Marvel is trying to shut CoH down or cripple it (like by making NCSoft remove particular costume traits so that customers can no longer make costumes that look like Marvel heroes). It seems to me that if Cryptic and company are making a good faith effort to police the ripoffs, that SHOULD be enough to get them off the hook. Of course, nobody ever said the law always made sense.