Hey, here’s a swift move that will no doubt make Marvel the favorite company of any number of fans and potential fans. Marvel is suing the City of Heroes folks because players of the online game can use its extremely flexible character design to design characters that look and act like … well, Marvel super-heroes.
How … adult of them.
It’s not that CoH has Marvel characters, or knock-offs thereof, inherently in it. It’s just that there’s nothing to stop players from creating big, strong, angry characters with green skin and purple pants. Or agile fighters with claws coming out of their hands and yellow/black/blue costumes. Or … well, you get the idea. And, in fact, players can name their characters … well, whatever they want. Including names that are trademarked by Marvel.
This is, of course, the fault of the software publisher and the company that hosts the game on their servers.
Feh. I think Scott Kurtz’s commentary on the subject is spot on.
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***Dave Does the Game
Lee reports that not only are trademarked names blocked from use, but they have admin running around checking for characters who look too much like trademarked characters. I didn’t ask what happened to the players, but he did mention that the admin keep a log of trademark abuse.
Huh. Interesting.
I wonder if their having taken some steps makes them vulnerable to the suit.
I suspect this is really just a cursory attempt by Marvel to “protect its trademarks” and there’s no real expectation to win.
As dust mentioned, it’s actually in the EULA that trademarked characters are not allowed and would be forced to change. Thus, all the Ticks, Supermen, and Hulks all had to change their avatars/toons or their names. The admin staff are quite actively keeping disallowed characters off. The offenders are reprimanded and their accounts flagged for the abuse.
Given the demonstrated efforts of NC Soft and Cryptic to police its character generation system, I think it’s fair to say that the Marvel suit won’t get very far beyond the opening salvos. It will keep some lawyers in a job for awhile, though.
The down side, of course, is that we no longer have the joy of running into a cluster of Wolverine, .Wolverine, Wulverine, Wolferine, Wooverine, and Wolvereens.
Maybe that’s not much of a down side.
I think that Ian is right. I’m not sure of the details, but you have to actively protect copyrights in order to keep them strong. This is probably just an instance of Marvel flexing those legal pecs so they don’t deteriorate.
Or something like that…
I’m confused…
Why is this a problem since nobody is profitting from the use of characters. If Marvel was so worried about damage to their property, then they should do a better job of managing their own work.
I’m so very tired about all of the companies pulling all of this stuff, that I’m getting to the point that the entire copyright laws need to be scrapped.
There was some speculation that it was diluting the brand value that Marvel anticipated getting from a different MMORPG that would have licensed Marvel characters (“Why should we pay you $5ZZ to let us use the Hulk as a character for people to play when kids are already doing it on CoH for free?”).
I dunno. I think Marvel should accept the flattery, and try to add *value* to a fully licensed Hulk MMORPG character.