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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."
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.
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
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