Copyright/Profane question

A somewhat educated guess is that that they have licensed to use the database used in TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System) (see http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp).

What they may not have done here is to apply enough filtering to sort out those that are not active/live and actually used commercially and used in the same line of business etc.

That being said, a search for a name like Dracula provide multiple hits for entries that are live and in commercial use, for both computer software and comics (the latter Marvel Characters, Inc.).

A custom villain of mine named Vego was caught in the filter - the only record for the name Vego that was live (but not in commercial use) was a submitted request from an Israelic company to use for packaged fresh cut vegetables.

There were however two live other live entries that were in commercial use that a search showed - but in those cases the trademarked name was not Vego (names were Optima and RFMIMO), but the company that had registered these names is Vego Technologies in Taiwan...

And to take another example fom previous comments, the word "Accessed" gives one hit for live records to "SEAS Secured Employees Accessed Safely".

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[url="http://adingworld.wordpress.com/mission-architect-story-arcs/"][b]My Story arcs[/b][/url]: [i]The Siren Supremes[/i] ([b]1143[/b]), [i]The Missing Geneticist[/i] ([b]2542[/b]), [i]Elemental Jones[/i] ([b]263512[/b]), [i]The Soul Hunter[/i] ([b]294431[/b]), [i]Heart of Steel[/i] ([b]407104[/b]), [i]Project Serpens[/i] ([b]434082[/b])

*looks in* So it's been two months and.... No? Nothing fixed yet?

Maybe I'll check back in a couple more months if I'm still here.

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The name Sunstorm is banned according to the AE Editor. Sunstorm, y'know, the Kheldian contact? I checked, too. The words Sun and Storm are fine, but Sunstorm is not. Moonfire and Shadowstar work fine. Also, the word Scorpion is still banned.

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You want to know the secret of the world? It's this: Save it, and it'll repay you, every second of every day.
@Dr. Reverend - My DeviantArt Gallery
Crow Call - Gods of the Golden Age

AE already served its intended purpose. It was a new shiny to entice more players to buy the game.

Fixing the filter won't increase sales so as long as it keeps the lawsuits away it will not be fixed.

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I can't use the name "Rogues Gallery".

Despite it being:

1. A common expression.
2. The name of two enemy groups in City of Heroes/Villains
3. Perfectly fine a year ago.

What is going on? Is the AE community not dead enough yet? Are they that desperate to make it as desolate as the PVP & base building communities?

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I'm guessing it's probably the word "Rogue" that's tripping that one.

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I still cannot use the word Rularuu; somewhat specific to CoX I would think but...

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Arc: 378122 "Tales of the Terran Space Marines -The Apocalypse Initiative" 5stars!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rgl4...687B0FC89F142C
Arc: 481545 "Twilight of the Gods - The Praetorian conflict"8000+ hits!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxJ6S...848B21E2350DCC

A thought occurred to me.

I hope they aren't pulling a I18 holding off the fix until the next full issue hits. In a lot of ways such an act would be too little too late since as was shown with the ally fix many won't know about it since it was buried in the Patch Notes.

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My only wish would be to remove the filter altogether. We, as players, have the ability to report these sort of things and have them be taken care of as they are needed.

Paragon Studios, please trust us to police our own in AE, we *WANT* to make wonderful content for you, but as it is, at least to me, this is an unusable tool.

Please let *US* be the filter, let *US* report the problems, you gave us that ability, goodness knows I've used it, I'm certain many others have as well.

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COMING SOON: A new Epic that will change the way you see Arachnos...
Brought to you by @Equation

So... the main character in my story arc, Bladed Justice... is somehow profane because of the word "bladed." How is that even a word on a list somewhere? It's not technically even a word, just a slight pun I came up with for the character.

I guess my arc is broken until they fix this, because he's the main character you run through this arc with: it can't be done without him. Unless anyone has an idea for me.

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Guide: Tanking, Wall of Fire Style (Updated for I19!), and the Four Rules of Tanking
Story Arc: Belated Justice, #88003
Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
Grey Pilgrim: Fire/Fire Tanker (50), Victory

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Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.

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Guide: Tanking, Wall of Fire Style (Updated for I19!), and the Four Rules of Tanking
Story Arc: Belated Justice, #88003
Synopsis: Explore the fine line between justice and vengeance as you help a hero of Talos Island bring his friend's murderer to justice.
Grey Pilgrim: Fire/Fire Tanker (50), Victory

Still experiencing issues with any word incorporating the word/name victor. Victorious, Victory, Evictor. .

Have seen improvement / resolution for most of the other issues my arcs had been experiencing. Still can't seem to get past victor, though..

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Justice Shall Prevail Where The Laws Of Men Fail

22079 - Best MMO of the Year : "Heroes of Paragon City "
137005 - Introduction to Mission Architect : the Heroic Badge Collection
149433 - The Fall of Mender Moebius : Part 1 : The Beginning of the End

Two more words on the Overzealous List:

• Countess Crey
• Breach

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Still @Shadow Kitty

"I became Archvillain before Statesman nerfed himself!"

If you want to use Black Scorpion in your MA missions you can't call him Black Scorpion.

Brilliant. Haha.

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I've discovered a few things with my Tomorrownauts arc:

-The term "Droids" is flagged by the filter, but not "Droid".
-The ally name "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid" is invalid because of "D Doom". See if you can spot why it's tripping that one. Hint: "Reprogrammed Doomsday Droid".

Seriously, the only true "fix" for this issue is to just remove the filter entirely. Don't bother trying to edit the file. Just disable the check in the MA system itself. I can understand wanting a profanity filter, but right now it's causing way more problems than it's solving; turning it off until you can get the filter file itself fixed will at least solve the many frustrations people are having with the system.

Also, arc is still broken - I can change all the names so the errors go away, but when I try to run a test, it pops up with a window that says "The field Name contains profane or copyright text" repeated 8 times - but with no errors I have no way of figuring out which names are tripping it.

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I have FINALLY fixed Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today!

Important hint to anyone who is having the same issue as I did trying to fix one of your arcs: If an ambush name contains "copyright/profane" errors, it will NOT show up in the "Errors" dialogue unless you actually open the ambush objective up. It will still prevent the arc from working, though.

Yes, this would be the "ambush name" field that is never actually seen by anyone playing the arc and only exists as a reference for the author and the system to identify the specific objective.

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With 3 months passed, looking to see if there are any updates on this issue.

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No, there doesn't seem to be.

After months of no news, I finally abandoned all hope of a real fix, bit the bullet and opened my arc to try to find the errors. I expected a ton of them because there's a lot of text.

Turned out that the only reason my arc has been unplayable for months is that I used the word Freakshow in the name of an ambush group. A name that is only visible to me. All the rest of the arc was apparently fine and threw up no errors at all, including where Freakshow appeared in the text the player could read.

I could've stocked an IHOP franchise with the amount of PANCAKING that resulted.

(And of course, my arc is now 4-starred because it was broken for months, so even now it's fixed no one will find it anyway.)

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Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.

I've completely given up even trying to edit one of my arcs (Starstone Industries : Crey vs the Giant Hogweed) because of this befuddling copyright/profane nonsense.

I first noticed trouble when I couldn't even get the thing to acknowledge a contact hologram when I clicked "Play". I wondered fleetingly if this might have been because I had to change my handle during the great global merger (the arcs were still showing under my old name, though the game was still registering my AE slots as 3/3) but a quick click on one of my other arcs did produce the correct custom contact hologram.

So I swapped back to "Crey vs the Giant Hogweed" and popped into the editor to see what was broken, and was assaulted by a slew of errors when I clicked Edit - none of which had been there previously (obviously) because the arc was already published and rated. One of these errors referred to my custom boss Special Agent Jenks who was now seemingly invalid because his name contained "Agent J".

When I tried to edit him, no new name I tried would save. I even tried renaming him to Diddlydiddlydoo, but the game reported that as invalid too.

I quit the character editor and noticed that in addition to Jenks in that mission, now Countess Crey was showing up as profane/copyrighted too. In fact, EVERY standard game group entity within the arc I clicked on after that returned the same proafne/copyright message.

Having given up on trying to fix this fiasco, I certainly didn't then feel like tackling the "looping errors" newly reported in the arc - errors which, I might add, I had previously completely eradicated after a long and careful battle of if/then logic steps.

I probably spend no more than 2% of my game time involved with any AE stuff anyway (whether writing my own stories or playing other people's), and whenever I do pop in and find myself confronted by yet another dose of fail like this, I am reminded of exactly why it is that AE occupies so little of my time.

It's a shame really, I rather liked that story.
*shrug*

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My two arcs, which both had worked prior to August 2011, were suddenly broken, due to the Copyright/Profane filter.

For the first arc, the "invalid" names are not even showing up as errors, so I can't fix them. To make the arc playable again, I would have to re-do the whole thing from scratch and cut and paste all dialogue, etc.

For the second arc, I had named the villains "automatons" (which is a very generic term) and two of the names I had chosen for minions and an EB, Sentinel and Eradictor, were decided to be copyright/profane by the filter. Thankfully, all I had to do was rename the group "Machines" and pick 2 new adjectives for the mobs. The annoying thing was that I had to delete and redo the custom characters, instead of just renaming them.

An extremely unusual side-effect of the invalid mobs was that my arc was still playable... but it had someone else's custom critters inserted into my arc. Very very odd.

While I do agree that an automated filter is needed, to a degree, I feel that it should be programmed a tad better: To allow for fixing of the arc.

Also, thank you to the one who wrote about checking all the ambushes. Apparently, my copyright/profane word was Rogues in a Crey vs Rogues ambush.

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Live arcs: 517377 and 517381
Virtue: Quickshot. Swiftwind. Aliuneidis. Gizmodeus. Dasher. Fiver. Inuit Acer. Daniel Darke. Cerebral Flame. El Halcon.
Intel Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz 4 GB RAM**NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT set to 1280 x 1024**Windows Vista 32 bit

I checked my arc and it turns out I got bit by this, too. The forbidden word? "CATGIRL". It seems to accept "cat-girl", but I can't figure out how to change the names of custom enemies and enemy groups.

Please, devs, PLEASE fix this stupid overzealous filter! A lot of the words being caught aren't trademarkable, let alone copyrightable!

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I'm assuming "catgirl" is because of profanity and sex, not copyright, but...

Yeah, this is implausible, perhaps even fantastic. Four of the authors I know have been affected by this, and I think even Twoflower (did you know that name is from a book?), the AE authoring colossus, has been bitten by it. The tagging appears to be broken, the list of filtered strings is ridiculous... More generally, even if a word does exist as a trademark in some context, that doesn't mean it's trademarked in other contexts.

Sometimes, a nightcrawler is just a worm. Sometimes, the guy who resupplies your pre-electric chest freezer is just the ice man.

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