Slashdot Mirror
Sony Attempts To Trademark "Let's Play"
An anonymous reader writes: Why is it that kids these days spend days upon days watching people play video games on Youtube and Twitch when they could spend those days playing games themselves? While we may never find out why, Let's Plays are an established part of today's gaming ecosystem, and the publishers want their piece of the pie. Nintendo lost love by forcefully taking the proceeds from ad revenue on Youtube for its videos, but Sony... never settling for second-best... has recently filed to trademark the phrase. I don't know what's more surprising: Sony's audacity to grab a phrase with recorded usage as far back as 2007... or that EA didn't think of it first.
While I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that "Let's play" by itself is pretty much impossible to trademark due to the basic rules of getting a trademark (as put by Wikipedia), though they might be able to claim it in the form of a particular logo incorporating the words...which wouldn't let them go after Let's Plays but might let them start sponsoring/branding their own Let's Play group.
Everything must be owned, including common words and phrases. Otherwise someone might be making money off of it and it wouldn't be us!!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is really no different than pro/college football/basketball etc. Lots of peeps can't play for one reason or another so they watch someone else play who is good. It has been this way for thousands of years. Only real difference is that you can sit at home instead of walking down to the Coliseum.
The term actually came from Something Awful forums and the "Lets play" threads where they'd take turns playing a game and posting the results. Dwarf fortress "succession" games would be the cannonical example here.
Sony has had no role in this, and they are trademarking something they have no right to.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Except the trademark applied for is a standard character format trademark which protects the actual phrase regardless of the particular font, color, design, etc. Sony is literally trying to get a trademark that will allow them to sue anyone who uses the phrase "Let's Play" for "Electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual, and audiovisual material via global and local computer networks."
There is nothing ambiguous and the only idiot is the one who is assuming that they're not doing what the application says they're doing; you.
"Non-binding action" was sent back in December, which is generally USPTO for fuck off.
Won't Sony be causing brand confusion by naming their brand after a well established term in their field of business?
Now all of a sudden, when people are talking/writing about "Let's Play", readers won't be able to tell whether they're talking about the fun free thing or the undoubtedly evil Sony thing.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Make sure you get the mark correctly here. This isn't a copyright, it is a trademark issue and something that is decidedly very different. It is really silly to confuse intellectual property as if it is all one and the same.
Then again, I've seen even supposedly competent lawyers screw the terms up and even misapply one kind of law with another.
It all depends on what Sony plans on doing with the phrase that will determine just how silly or useful the trademark will become. If Sony is doing to be adding hooks into their consoles to encourage YouTubers to make videos of games on those consoles as some sort of special console feature.... I'd be very supportive of the idea. The one click hooks that Mojang put into Minecraft (to give an example) that allows content to be streamed directly to Twitch could be expanded upon and simply installed by default into the next upgrade of the PlayStation line for all games played on that console. Calling that the Sony Let's Play service would be a really good idea and a real selling point in the console industry.
Using it to shut down other more inventive Let's Play content developers on the other hand is likely not going to work out so well.
Laws are often written in such a way as to be open to a number of different interpretations. My Dad's a lawyer, though it's been quite awhile since he's been one by trade, and the things he's described to me... (shudder).
Hmm, no. They're the collaborative social playing of a game, together.
What you've described is far more akin to twitch streaming, although people have used misidentified it as a Let's Play.
I think Twitch's tremendous success demonstrates that although you may not be part of that market, there's a clear market for people wanting to watch people play games.