Slashdot Mirror
Bethesda Tells Minecraft Creator: Cease and Desist
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."
once they act on the word "Arena" in relation to Zenimax-owned products Elder Scrolls: Arena and Quake III Arena...
Apple can suck my iPenis.
Anywhere between 5 and 10... I usually get 5 that are marked with the number 20 on a regular basis. I trade these scrolls with other people for goods and services and they usually hand me back scrolls with the numbers 1, 5, 10 or different combinations thereof in change. ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
"Apple", "Computer", and "Inc."?
If we were to ask a magic eight-ball about this, it would probably suggest something along the lines of "My sources say no."
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
are Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish, Myth, Wonderland... loved these in the 80s/early 90s and still do. A 5,25" floppy disk, wrapped around a rolling pin, that's my earliest encounter with scrolls in video games.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Technology companies are pretty good about properly integrating their marketing and public relations efforts into the business proper. So if they need to do a safety recall the PR people are involved in the process; a decent PR guy can turn "the XYZ-5000 sprays customers with burning acid" recall into "XYZ really cares about its customers, and as a lovely fluffy precaution we're fixing all our XYZ-5000s, even though most of them are perfectly super and don't experience moderate thermal variances". Engineering, QA, customer relations, finance - every department doesn't get to communicate with the public (or do anything that's obviously going to end up being public) without someone in PR there to make sure the message is put out right.
Legal departments, by dint of (often broken) corporate org-trees are a notable exception to this. When they see a problem, they fix it the lawyer way, and the rest of the company never knows until after the fact. In olden times of yore stuff like this was trivia between one legal office and another, and only the most nebbish of corporate historian ever know why a product changed its name or wasn't orange coloured any more. So the lawyers behaved as they always did, striking as quickly and as hard as they could, writing letters as outlandishly vitriolic and court pleadings as wildly exaggerated as they felt they could get away with, knowing that things would stay on the downlow and whatever happened only the outcome would matter to anyone.
They didn't consider that, if you sent someone a demand letter, the first thing they'd do is tweet about it to their entire customer base (which turns out to be a big proportion of your customer base too), and post the letter (with all its wild and crazy claims) on the internet, for everyone to point and laugh at. If it's the all-too-common shot across the bows (rather than a serious attempt) you risk looking like a rather unhinged bully.
Like it or not (and the lawyers don't like it, and decorate their broadsides with all kinds of "if you publish this letter we'll sue to for that too" stuff) everything anyone in the corporation does reflects on the whole outfit. The PR folks should be in on the ground floor with anything like this. They don't get to veto every lawsuit or every letter, but they can put a choke-hold on the stupid. Right now Zenimax's PR guy has his head in his hands; I'll bet the first thing he knew about the whole affair was when he read it online, and he'll spend next week fighting fires and soothing angry faces. Notch probably won't change the name, but if he does that's just another news cycle of bad PR for Zenimax.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
The first rule of having a trademark is "don't lose your trademark." This is done by defending it against every potential threat, no matter how tenuous the connection.
Essentially, if you don't defend yourself, then your trademark is automatically weakened.
For example, if your trademark is for a video game called "Elder Scrolls," and you allow a game called "Scrolls," to be published unchecked, then you've effectively stated that the word "Scrolls," and titles including that word, are all acceptable, and cannot be challenged by trademark.
In the end, Zenimax either maintains their current position by forcing Notch to back down, or their trademark is more clearly defined, including restrictions on what Notch can call this and its sequels (if any).
Thus the only losing move is not to play.
Every now and then we see lawyers for a company do silly things like this. Lawyers live in their own world, nearly wholly disconnected from ours. In their world, they send lots of letters on anything that even remotely might kind of sorta maybe be in the same ballpark as their trademark.
In the real world, marketing sees the reaction to that. When it makes news (like this case), marketing goes to the CEO and says "hey legal is causing us grief." The CEO then tells legal to play nice in this case. Particularly since if they actually tried to challenge this in court they'd get laughed at.
So, publicity will solve this one.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yep, and it's pretty settled: Microsoft lost in the USA when claiming "Microsoft Windows" somehow gave them the exclusive right to the common word "Windows." And don't even get me started about that "edge" crap.
If you write a game about X (e.g. scrolls,) there is basically no way in the USA you can be prevented from using X in your product's name. It is descriptive, and can not be the exclusive property of someone else.