• Notch being sued by Bethesda
    235 replies, posted
[quote=Notch's blog] A lot of people want more details about what is going on, so here is everything I know: 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. About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register “Minecraft” as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for “Scrolls”, the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like “Scrolls”, but we sent in the application anyway. (Disclosure: We’ve enforced the trademark for Minecraft once, when there was a minecraft clone on iOS, using our name. People were emailing me saying our iOS version was buggy and bad, so we asked them to change the name of their game, and they did.) A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. 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. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this. Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started. I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell. [/quote] Source: [url]http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8519901309/bethesda-are-suing-us-heres-the-full-story[/url]
Fucking assholes.
Claiming a trademark of the word Scroll in a fucking title is just stupid.
No this is our word, you better give us money everytime you read a dictionary!!!!
Well that's stupid.
-wow, okay, snip-
Fuck Bethesda.
Fucking hell Bethesda go suck a dick
What the fuck Bethesda, I thought you were cool.
Did they put their fax number on their website?
fuck it.[img]http://sn.im/27z1w9[/img]
[QUOTE=Smug Bastard;31551245]Did they put their fax number on their website?[/QUOTE]Send them goatse... ...do it.
That's it, no fucking Skyrins sons or any of that shit for me!
Go bethesda. Your games are better and not made in java.
[QUOTE=Karmah;31551309]Go bethesda. Your games are better and not made in java.[/QUOTE] I seriously hope thats sarcasm. in after bandwagon
What in the name of all that fucks?
Seems like they overreacted a bit at the end. I can understand the part where they're like "Hey we noticed you're trying to trademark Scrolls, but we think that infringes our trademark." But Notch should have and probably did say, "Let the trademark office sort it out." As far as I could tell, they hadn't been granted the Trademark yet, and the game isn't really being marketed at all yet. Bethesda should have just filed some paperwork at the trademark office so they could decide if it infringed or not and then granted the trademark if it didn't.
Everyone named Beth now owes Bethesda money
Who refers to it as Elder Scrolls anyway? It's always been Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.
[QUOTE=Thom12255;31551358]Who refers to it as Elder Scrolls anyway? It's always been Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.[/QUOTE] Well what if you want to talk about the series as a whole? It's "The Elder Scrolls" then, regardless of whether you shorten it to TES or not.
well they do appear in game but in like one mission...
The Elder Scrolls is a seperate trademark, so if someone trademarks something like Elder Retirement Homes, would they be sued too?
tomorrow we find out that bethesda also owns "the" and valve owns the words "left" and "dead"
[QUOTE=Bletotum;31551432]tomorrow we find out that bethesda also owns "the" and valve owns the words "left" and "dead"[/QUOTE] Preschools that do math involving the number 4 and 2 get sued!
This just in: Doomworld gets sued for Doom trademark
[QUOTE=lavacano;31551391]Well what if you want to talk about the series as a whole? It's "The Elder Scrolls" then, regardless of whether you shorten it to TES or not.[/QUOTE] ether way, no one refers to it as scrolls, and quite frankly, I'm quite certain that notch would win this, for one it doesn't cause any confusion between brands, and 2 bethesda has a copyright on The Elder Scrolls, and not Scrolls
Mojang should win this. This is just bullshit. Actually there shouldn't even be a discussion about it.
This must be the higher ups, not the developers.
I'm going to trademark the English alphabet. Sue everyone for everything.
If they don't drop this, then he should turn around and sue them if they have: -any exploding enemies -any references to creeps, creepers, or creepiness -any references to mining -any references to crafting -any references to notches -any diamonds -any square objects And then get Facebook to sue them for their face-making technology. Just to be safe.
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