Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team."

Comments

So basically...

[Kokuyo]

Blizzard first gets you intimidated by their figurative muscle, before the Don walks up to you, making you an offer you can't refuse?

Re:So basically...

[MartijnL]

Blizzard first gets you intimidated by their figurative muscle, before the Don walks up to you, making you an offer you can't refuse?

Basically Activision Legal fires off the first shot before people with real brains realize the potential for something like this. The people with the brains probably did not know this existed before the C&D became news.

Re:So basically...

[IndustrialComplex]

This is not a Chinese company selling pirated copies or anything, but a community member using Blizzard tools to create content. How that would ever warrant a C&D is beyond me and I have a hard time believing their legal monkeys don't know that difference.

Trademarks must be vigorously defended in the United States or you risk losing them. Not copyright, copyright you retain regardless of your desire to use it.

In this way, Trademarks are actually a bit more sane as they require the company to invest a little bit of effort and time in order to maintain them. Let it sit on a shelf, or be neglectful and you lose your right to it if someone else starts extracting some value from the item. It is this way because you can Trademark some seemingly generic terms and keeps people from just trademarking everything in the dictionary (for what, $200 registration?) and then suing everyone.

So, back to Activision.

They own trademarks on Starcraft, and World of Warcraft. Someone comes along and makes a game called World of Starcraft. A mashup of two trademarks which is built on products sold by the company that owns the aforementioned trademarks.

It is incredibly easy to imagine that if a person were to come across this mod or its website that someone would consider the connection between the brand Starcraft, and the brand Warcraft. In fact, that WAS the literal intention of the creator of this mod. His goal in choosing the name was to link Starcraft, and World of Warcraft.

So, in this legal system where you have to vigorously defend your trademark or lose it. You have someone which clearly used two trademarked names in the promotion of his product. If the lawyers DIDN'T respond to this they wouldn't be doing their jobs.

Now, perhaps they could have been a bit more clear in their C&D, but that would open them up to liability. How you ask? What if they said:

"Stop using these trademarked terms until you get permission to use them"

A hell of a lot nicer yes? Except that it could imply that they might be granted permission. If they go through the hassle of trying to request permission, only to find that there is some policy in place that prohibits granting permission to use the trademarks to entities such as themselves then they may have grounds, however slim, to suggest that Activision was simply dicking them around and wasting their time/money. Waste someone's time and money like that and you have the potential for a lawsuit.

So, A Cease and Desist letter is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect when using trademarks in an unauthorized fashion.

Had they called their mod "Our New MMO" and they received a Cease and Desist, I'd consider it outrageous, but as it is, they should have expected one.

Mixed messages

[senorpoco]

I know that I always preface an invitation to dinner with a petty lawsuit. It gives us something to talk about if the conversation runs dry.

Full Statement

[pgn674]

Here is the full statement from Blizzard: www.GameInformer.com - Blizzard Responds To World Of StarCraft Mod

Re:Bad strategy

[thesandtiger]

Except it's cheaper and possibly even better in the long run for their reputation to do things the quick and easy way and then fix their mistakes.

Fire out the C&D letters without spending time & money to investigate - cheap. If one of the C&Ds generates a bit of bad PR, THEN quickly move to respond, showing that you listen, can admit mistakes, and fix 'em. Look at this thread - everyone's pointing out that it was probably the legal department that screwed up and giving kudos to Blizzard's dev team for making things good. Overall that's a huge net win for the entire organization: the lawyers look bad (who cares?) while the people who make the content look great.