“Hey EA, hold my beer.”
Take-Two, parent company to Rockstar, woke up and chose violence. Which is impressive, as it puts them in the running against Activision Blizzard, who recently fired a bunch of QA contractors from Raven (a company lamentably stuck in the Call of Duty mines) after stringing them along with the possibility of raises for several months beforehand. The good news is, they’re freed from the CoD mines. The bad news is, they’re also freed from a steady job. But we’re sadly not talking about that, but rather about Take-Two, Rockstar, and frivolous trademark claims.
See, Hazelight put out a game by Josef Fares (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons) titled It Takes Two earlier this year. And as it turns out, before it even released, Take-Two had slapped it with a trademark claim.
Essentially, this forced Hazelight to abandon the trademark to It Takes Two because of this. And if you think they’re alone, you’re sadly mistaken. Because they’ve been super aggressive with anything that they view as threatening their trademarks, or even feature letters in a logo that are the same letters as in one of their logos.
Exempli gratia, the XFL’s Dallas Renegades, which ate a trademark claim because their logo, an “R” in a circle, apparently looks too much like the Rockstar logo. Why, good Lord, how could you possibly tell the two of them apart?
Hell, anything adjacent to one of their trademarks is getting slammed. Anything that contains some permutation of the compound word “rockstar” got a claim. They’re, no joke, filing claims against anything using the terms “rockstar”, “social club”, “mafia”, “civilization”, and countless other mostly generic terms, despite most of these words and phrases predating anything they could have ever filed in time to actually lay claim to them. Hell, some of them even predate the very laws that they are manipulating to do this.
As video games industry lawyer Richard Hoeg, of the Virtual Legality podcast, puts it:
You can start to see applicants peremptorily limit their own applications to (try to) avoid getting extended out. As well as plenty of folks with legitimate applications simply choosing not to fight by defaulting on the opposition.
If you look at the Trial and Appeals Board, you can see that Take-Two as filed at least extension requests for 25 challenges in the last three months. Most other game companies go back 6 or 7 years to get to that number. Take-Two is being very, very aggressive.
It Takes Two by comparison, isn’t a company name, and it’s of limited use in any event due to the sheer number of goods and services that already use the phrase. I would suspect they simply wind up going untrademarked and relying on copyright.
The entire situation is, to put it bluntly, fucking ridiculous. I honestly can’t imagine any legal authority taking them at face value when weighed against the literal thousands of people and businesses that they’re currently in the process of burning.
Source: Eurogamer
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