Tag: Trademark

Today in Bullsh%$ IP Lawsuits

No Comments
AM General just had a lawsuit it filed against Activision thrown out.

The lawsuit claimed that the Call of Duty game violated AM General’s trademark on its Humvee truck:
+

A federal judge ruled this week that Activision has a first amendment right to include Humvees in its Call of Duty titles, despite vehicle manufacturer AM General’s claims of trademark infringement and false advertising for the in-game use of the military vehicles.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit first filed by AMG in 2017, which suggested that Call of Duty players were being “deceived into believing that AM General licenses the games or is somehow connected with or involved in the creation of the games.” That’s not a completely ridiculous idea, since Activision and other major game manufacturers generally arranged licenses for their in-game guns until 2013.

In his ruling this week, though, District Judge George B. Daniels dismissed AM General’s claim. That decision hinged in part on a 1989 precedent that established that artistic works could make reference to outside trademarks as long as the usage was relevant to the work and did not “explicitly mislead as to the source of the content or work.”

We really need to reign in excessive IP protections.

They do not serve the needs of society.

Some IP Sanity out of the EU

No Comments

One of the differences between something like patents and copyrights and trademarks is that the first two are of limited duration, and the latter is forever.

This is why I am heartened that the EU Court Of Justice has ruled that the basic form of the Rubik’s cube cannot be trademarked:

You all should be familiar with a Rubik’s Cube, the three-dimensional puzzle toy that for some reason your grandmother kept on her coffee table to frustrate you while she watched Matlock. This invention of the 1970s still enjoys widespread popularity, with hundreds of millions of them being sold every year. The toy has been patented for some time, but ten years ago, a British company that manages the intellectual property rights for the toy also applied for trademark protection on the cube’s design in the EU. The reason for this should be obvious: patent protections last for limited amounts of time, while trademark rights exist essentially in perpetuity, so long as it’s actively used in the marketplace. It’s an end-around to patent law designed to lock up a monopoly.

But, in the case of the Rubik’s Cube, it didn’t work, as the European Union Court of Justice has correctly determined that the trademark applied for by Seven Towers was for a functional and technical solution, not one of branding. German competitor Simba Toys had challenged the trademark, and it won.

ECJ judges agreed with Simba Toys’ arguments. Their decision is final and cannot be appealed.

“In examining whether registration ought to be refused on the ground that shape involved a technical solution, EUIPO and the General Court should also have taken into account non-visible functional elements represented by that shape, such as its rotating capability,” they said.

EUIPO will now have to issue a new decision based on the ECJ judgment.

Trade and service marks are to protect branding, not functionality, and what the Rubik;s folks were doing was trying to apply a trade mark to functional characteristics, because any patent has long since expired.

Good call by the court.