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Actually, I read some of the court's ruling on a hearing for Marvel's Motion for Temporary Injunction. It has been years since I read it, but I recall that the Judge had some interesting things to say. In these kind of cases, the case is often won or lost at this early stage.|
Originally Posted by sleestack
The following is my opinion/guess about why the Marvel lawsuit was settled and didn't even go to court.
1) A Marvel employee purchased City of Heroes, using Marvel money, and makes a Wolverine character with the look and name. 2) Marvel sues because the City of Heroes character creator allows players to make clones of Marvel characters, and shows their Wolverine clone as evidence. 3) A smart lawyer at NCSoft realized that, under the terms of service that the Marvel employee (and thus Marvel itself) agreed to, technically Marvel had transferred rights to the Wolverine character to NCSoft. 4) NCSoft points out to Marvel that NCSoft could make a claim on Wolverine, due to Marvel accepting City's ToS. NCSoft offers to police future characters for copyright infringement, as well as giving up any claim on Wolverine, if Marvel drops the lawsuit. 5) Marvel wisely drops the lawsuit. Again, just conjecture. But if I can think of this, I'm pretty sure at least one of NCSoft's lawyers probably did as well. |
I recall the judge commenting that several Marvel employees logged in to CoH and made characters who were similar to the Marvel characters just to prove that the CoH character creator could be used to make copies of Marvel characters. The judge was critical of this, since it was Marvel's own employees who were actively creating violations of Marvel's Trademarks. Since the game allowed so much variety of making characters, CoH did not "cause" a trademark violation any more than a drawing program designed to make super heroes did. Plus, CoH had built into the EULA that any violation of trademark was not allowed, so CoH was clearly attempting to prohibit trademark violations.
As a result, the Temporary Injunction was denied . . . and Marvel settled with NC Soft soon afterwards. The terms of these kinds of settlements are rarely disclosed, but I suspect that the settlement mainly required NC Soft to use its reasonable best efforts to prohibit copying of Marvel's Trademarks . . . which is in the EULA anyway.
Still, even though NC Soft may have settled with Marvel, that would not stop another company from filing a similar suit . . . they would probably lose, but they could still file the law suit. And defending law suits is expensive.
LOCAL MAN! The most famous hero of all. There are more newspaper stories about me than anyone else. "Local Man wins Medal of Honor." "Local Man opens Animal Shelter." "Local Man Charged with..." (Um, forget about that one.)
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Small, but important nit pick. You meant trademark and not copyright. You do not lose copyright protection if you don't defend it. But you could lose a trademark.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
I think this is close to the truth. Marvel, by how the copyright laws are written, was obligated to sue once they learned that copycat characters could be made, and the DMCA was a big factor in why they didn't win.
It seems to me to be one of those situations where the only winners are the damned lawyers because neither company won. Both wasted a ton of cash going around in legal circles. |
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Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
Also, if you read the EULA further (I did, just to make sure for myself), it implicitly states that any character you create in the game is the property of NCSoft.
If you create a copyrighted/trademarked character in the game, it can be viewed as NCSoft claiming to own that character. If NCSoft is shown to be aware of said violation and does nothing a lawsuit could be the result of it, because of the clause Forbin already mentioned that requires the copyright owner to take action in order to retain their rights to their IP. That said, the OP probably has nothing to worry about, since it would be a bit of a stretch to say his characters are violating any particular copyright or trademark. |
It is an extremely important distinction.
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You're right to point that out. Thanks for the correction.
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Originally Posted by MunkiLord
Small, but important nit pick. You meant trademark and not copyright. You do not lose copyright protection if you don't defend it. But you could lose a trademark.
Copyright owners don't have to protect anything to retain their copyright. Only trademark. It is an extremely important distinction. |
the devs do what the devs do, it's their job to worry about this nonsense.
Quisling players who get all tingly when they find something to run to Daddy about still make me sick.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Your build must have very high Sleep defense and resistance. |
Originally Posted by Local_Man
Actually, I read some of the court's ruling on a hearing for Marvel's Motion for Temporary Injunction.
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"How do you know you are on the side of good?" a Paragon citizen asked him. "How can we even know what is 'good'?"
"The Most High has spoken, even with His own blood," Melancton replied. "Surely we know."
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Or even before the movie comes out. I've seen an even higher than usual number of shield carrying super soldiers recently.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Heck every time a new super hero movie comes out theres a bunch of clones running around for about a month or so until the GM's get them all genericed.
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No xXThorXxs though. Not high profile enough or is it just that War Mace really that bad?
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Thor must need a new agent, because War Mace got buffed a couple of years back and is a very good set currently.
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Originally Posted by NightshadeLegree
No xXThorXxs though. Not high profile enough or is it just that War Mace really that bad?
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My Characters
Knight Court--A CoH Story Complete 2/3/2012
I was in a PUG with an Electric/War Mace Tanker who was clearly based on Thor, but the design more closely resembled on the mythological figure (red hair, beard, etc), and this was sometime last year, long before the Thor Hype Train really got going.
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
the devs do what the devs do, it's their job to worry about this nonsense.
Quisling players who get all tingly when they find something to run to Daddy about still make me sick. |
Careful Goat your nerdrage is showing.quis·ling
[kwiz-ling]
–noun a person who betrays his or her own country by aiding an invading enemy, often serving later in a puppet government; fifth columnist.
Origin:
1940; after Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), pro-Nazi Norwegian leader.
So your implying NCSoft and the GM's as an invaders that don't have a legitimate claim in enforcing the rules of the game, and the people that help them are traitors to their country.
Either that or he's implying he's using words without understanding what they mean. Just throwing that out there.
I've posted about this before and my position on it hasn't changed. I'll continue to report blatant violations because they're blatant violations. They're obnoxious and the players who deliberately and defiantly create them need to be generic'd. It's not that difficult to use a litlte creativity and the people who claim that all the good names are taken are full of it. If the only name you can think of is XxX-Wolverine-XxX, then think some more. Or at all.
Now, that isn't to say that everyone who reports people to the GMs is in the right either. People should be reported because they are blatant and obvious violations of the EULA. Not because they kicked you from a team or because they wouldn't give you that million influence you wanted or whatever. If you're reporting someone "to get back at them", then you need to log off and get a life. These kinds of reports are usually borderline at best if not entirely specious and they just waste the time of the GMs. Personally I think people who demonstarte a pattern of this kind of behavior should themselves face punitive action. It's these folks that lead to the responsible players getting a bad name.
Well, that and the unrepentant rule-breakers who are so quick to cry "fanboi" and attack anyone who (*gasp*) can follow simple common-sense rules like "don't rip stuff off", but no one really cares what those people think, nor should they.
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I'm sorry that math > your paranoid delusions, but them's the breaks -- Nethergoat
P.E.R.C. Rep for Liberty server
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Darn right. And some yammering from a goat is hardly going to deter me. Having said that, I've only felt it necessary to petition two characters for name/appearance in the years I've been here. One was a blatant Green Lantern rip-off, in every possible detail (costume, name, bio). The other character had a name that was a reference to a sexual act.
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Originally Posted by Justaris
I've posted about this before and my position on it hasn't changed. I'll continue to report blatant violations because they're blatant violations.
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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In my opinion as long as they behave I ignore them. I only petition them when they have gone out of their way to violate the rules. For example I recall one that was gay bashing and another time one was throwing around racial slurs.
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Originally Posted by Ironblade
Darn right. And some yammering from a goat is hardly going to deter me. Having said that, I've only felt it necessary to petition two characters for name/appearance in the years I've been here. One was a blatant Green Lantern rip-off, in every possible detail (costume, name, bio). The other character had a name that was a reference to a sexual act.
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<--- Quietly goes off and deletes his Adolphe Menjou copycat character.