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MMO Fan Site Removes Character Stats Over Trademark Claim
steveb3210 writes "EQ2Wire.com is a fan site for the MMO Everquest 2. One feature of their site is a searchable portal for all game-related stats such as characters, equipment, items, and mobs which they generate from an XML feed provided by the game's publisher. Recently, the owner of a trademark has been threatening them over the name of a character and in the face of possible legal bills, they were forced to remove the character's profile from their site. Adding further insult to injury, the character seems to have been created prior to the trademark in question."
I hereby trademark "Anonymous Coward". You are all infringing by reading what I say. Pay me $10.
This part was amusing:
The misusage of a trademark is a crime and has serious consequence as civil case and criminal case.
Haha what? Is there really a country that has criminalized the using of someone else's trademark? Or is the guy writing these letters really as stupid as he sounds?
this company has a trademark to the name for use with game characters? trademarks are limited in scope, not all-encompassing-anything-with-the-name exclusivity. e.g. there can be a mcdonald's roofing, just like there's a mcdonald's restaurant.. but there can be only one mcdonald's restaurant... and that restaurant chain can't do a damn thing about mcdonald's roofing unless they start selling prepared food.
they have no business demanding, or even asking, for its removal. period....
Trademarks apply within the Trade field of the company that registers the trademark.
You can't do Nike sports wear. But Nike is not a gaming company. You can make a Nike game.
The appropriate response to any trademark take down request is -
a) send me a notarized copy of a trademark registration document for the trademark in question that is currently valid in the country you wish to assert your ownership.
b) explain to me how the usage in this context infringes on your trademark. In your explaination cover
i) physical locality of the usage you claim infringes and its relationship to region your trademark registration is in
ii) a detailed description of how the usage in the claimed infringement conflicts with the registered usage.
c) notice that failure to do a) b) will result in no action taken on my part. Insufficient detail and in particular legal grounding for the explanation provided in b) will result in delays and requests for more details. In particular a simple claim in b) that "they used our trademark" without any attempt at detailing domain of usage conflicts will result in the ignoring of your request as insufficiently documented.
Not sure I would seriously consider legal threats from someone who uses the word "coz" in their email.
Too bad there's not some 'first copyright use trumps filing of intent-to-use trademark application" doctrine to make that relevant.
Umm, there is but, in the case of the character name it's not being used in commerce (trade) so, I'm at a loss of how trademark law would apply. Had this been a valid trademark case, the person who owns the character could have filed to have the filing removed but, there are just too many buts in this case
I handle trademark and some copyright stuff for a small non-profit. I've never had to threaten anyone and I've never pretended to be a lawyer, I just ask nice, explain and get good results. Had I come across a MMO character name that was the same as our trademark (which begs the question of how I found it, as I only look for infringement in places where infringement is likely to happen and cause harm), I at most would have been amused and can't imagine why I would contact anyone.
In all my cases it's either been 1) I don't want people to think we are associated with you or 2) your use is likely to cause confusion of the brand. The case against the OP is sad and laughable.
Malshandir is the character name. I have no idea why the summary didn't post it. Kinda a cool name. When I get home, I'm gonna create a character/profile with that name in: Youtube Diablo 3 World of Warcraft Guild Wars Guild Wars 2 XBox Live Slashdot (oh wait, I already did that one). And anywhere else I can think of. But seriously, WTF?!?
I know someone (I don't like this person) that works at a firm that enforces copyright as a service. It's very simple, they get a contract to find infringement. They have teams of people that use scripted software to find said infringement, then they GET PAID BASED ON HOW MUCH THEY FIND. They send their lists on to the legal department who gets it taken down. Then the client gets a bill... we found X number of infringements, we got Y taken down, Here are the ones you'll have to take to court, you owe us Z.
All the ones that just take them down without a fight never even get to the content owner. They just pay a fee to not deal with them. Does it make more sense now?
The original intent of trademarks was to prevent people from releasing products under the same corporate or product name. It was not intended to stifle free speech in order to provide corporations with a cash cow so that they can charge people for sharing information about products. Part of me would recommend standing up for yourself and refusing to take down the content since their claims are somewhat spurious. The other half of me would recommend replacing the content useful to the Everquest community with a notice that a greedy corporation has made overreaching trademark claims and the content is being taken down to prevent any beneficial side effects it might have generated for that company's intellectual property.
Nevertheless, the guy is a sleazebag. There are several pointers to this guy operating out of the basement of his mom's house and being a pure troll with no merit whatsoever to his claims:
An Arcor email address. He doesn't have his own domain and uses a consumer-level ISP issued email service.
A German owning an UK Ltd. smells. Smells of destitution. There are a couple of strings attached to a German GmbH. Prior businesses gone bust, outstanding claims and other doubts concerning his reliability will prevent him from forming one.
This guy is all noise and no brawn to back it up. If I'd run a popular EQ2 site I would ask if one of the users was a lawyer and would be willing to represent this guy with a snarky lawyerese snail-mail letter containing substantial speculation about the insubstantial size of his male member. Pro bono(which is legalese for "for the lulz").
20 minutes into the future