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

A new low.

[dprust]

A new low in using the courts to unethically hurt the competition. It makes me scared to innovate. For example, I'm writing a music description language. If someone uses it to create music that is significantly similar to a copyrighted piece of work, am I going to get sued? This abuse of the courts is killing this country.

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.

Re:A new low.

[Tyreth]

Quick! Ban colour pencils so that people cannot make duplicate drawings of Marvel heroes! It is rumored that pencils can be used to "design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros".

Oh noes!

[Oncogene]

This is akin to suing Bic because it allows users to draw pictures extremely similar to Hulk or Wolverine.

Re:Oh noes!

[Walkiry]

>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?

It gets better, they actually do disallow them. Cryptic sent a request to Marvel, DC and others for a list of trademarked stuff they wanted banned, and you won't be able to name your character just "Hulk" or "Superman", because that's filtered.

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

PUT DOWN THAT PENCIL!!!

[maskedbishounen]

You're violating our IP rights.

Thanks,
You friends from Marvel

Honestly, though. Companies are taking IP far too seriously these days. Calm down, get over it. If anything, it shows whatever you're doing is working, because it's popular! Don't trash it by being a jerk.

Marvel - 100% original copies

[Japong]

Ah yes, the Hulk - because BIG GREEN GUY with TORN PANTS is such a hugely original concept and - what's that Mr. Hyde? I wouldn't like you when you're...mad... no... wait NOOOOO!

The elite may freely violate copyright?

[cfalcon]

Your argument is equivalent to saying that it's ok if the elite (in this case, those skilled in drawing) violate copyright, but to make that available to everyone is wrong.

In fact, neither case is correct, and the horrible nonlogic of damaging a general purpose system with the goal of restricting certain things is stupid.

To take this from the other side, if Marvel wins this terrible case, then that implies that creating a character in City of Heroes is akin to creating one in a comic book- so if your guy has an orange cape and yellow tights and black hair, maybe you can sue someone who introduces such a character in comic books. Meaning that, if you want to create a comic book with an entirely new character, you can't just check the history of comics, you have to access the CoH (and any other relevant MMORG) database to make sure you aren't "infringing" on a similar design that some kid in Kansas came up with at 2 AM on pot.