posted
Some of you probably remember that a while ago there was a lawsuit between Fox and Warner Brothers over the rights to the "Watchmen" movie.
More recently, Activision, which rather unceremoniously "dropped" a number of titles including Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend, decided to bring a lawsuit against developer Double Fine around the time they were to bring Brutal Legend out under EA.
And just for giggles, I'd also like to throw in a situation some might not be aware of with a little company called Edge Games (mild language warning) which these days apparently produces very little besides lawsuits.
Now, I'm not a legal expert, and I'm sure there are some who would say that this is more or less business as usual. But it seems to me that whatever the current legal status of suits like these, they trample all over the spirit and original purpose of these laws. It's not, in either the Watchmen or Brutal Legend case, that the companies suing were in any way unaware that the product's creators were intending to bring their product to market; indeed, both properties were the subject of lengthy ad campaigns. Instead, they came in when it would be most harmful to the relevant companies to have to pull out in the hopes of either stifling the product into non-existance, taking control of a finished product on the cheap without having to pony up for the development, or at least gaining a significant financial reward.
There are several terms that come to mind for folks who employ these kind of tactics, and "vulture" is the most printable.
I feel like we really ought to have something on the books to protect the people who create actual CONTENT from those who just sit on licenses, or licenses of licenses, or slips and shadows of pieces of licenses. At least in the case where the intention to create was widely publicized before the content's creation.
posted
A possible solution might be to institute a statute of limitations on claiming a name/title. (This applies more to the Edge thing than to the Activision thing. In the Activision case I think it should be pretty straightforward to unceremoniously drop a case that clearly has no ground and fine Activision for even trying, but no.... that's just too obvious)
So once you've announced your game/idea (through some official channel, which might or might not already exist), they have X months to file a complaint. Given how fast information spreads these days six months should be more than enough. (Although that would probably just result in them waiting until just before whatever the end of the waiting period is).
Is there (or could there be) a streamlined, easily searchable database of who owns what copyrights? If that got set up, the restrictions could be even tighter. As soon as you own a license or trademark you're entered into the system, whenever someone else files for a similar Keyword you have a week to flag it and a few more weeks to file an official stink over it.
In all the above cases, it seems to me there should be an automatic countermeasure for punishing people/corporations that attempt to sue people when they clearly have no basis for it. You should not need to go to court when accusation is laughable, and corporations should not be able to launch a bunch of lawsuits into the wind and see what sticks with no penalties.
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