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Bethesda Tells Minecraft Creator: Cease and Desist

Posted by Soulskill on from the lawyers-being-lawyers dept.

dotarray writes with news that Notch, creator of Minecraft, has received a letter from Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda, demanding that he rename his company's new game, which is called Scrolls. They claim it bears too strong a resemblance to The Elder Scrolls. Notch said: "First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is. ... I agree that the word 'Scrolls' is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image. The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games."

3 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Billable hours by Cruciform · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If this is how Zenimax's legal representation justifies their retainers they should be fired.

  2. Meanwhile... by devphaeton · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ....meanwhile, i have yet to see Notch get his panties in a bunch about Total Miner, the C- Minecraft knockoff coming to Xbocks Live in the near future. Yes I know the history of Minecraft, and I know that Notch borrowed a lot from Infiniminer. But this also goes to show that game 'concepts' aren't sacred.

    I can see if Notch named his new game "Alder Scrolls" or "Newer Scrolls" or "Minerfall: The Buggiest Scrolls Evar" or "Iron Scroll: Mining The Oblivion" or anything else that would directly allude to another game. I don't know about Scrolls, but it sounds as if it isn't anything like any of the Elder Scrolls games. Games which btw aren't really about scrolls in particular.

    Hmm...

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  3. Re:I can't imagine this will be upheld... by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe this is just because they have to be proactive about keeping their trademark or something. I don't know. Stupid. :)

    The problem is that afaict there is no penalty for overreaching when enforcing your trademark but there is a VERY significant penalty (loss of enforcability of the trademark) for nor reaching far enough.

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