{"id":176732,"date":"2020-04-02T19:32:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T00:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/04\/02\/today-in-bullsh-ip-lawsuits\/"},"modified":"2020-04-02T19:32:00","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T00:32:00","slug":"today-in-bullsh-ip-lawsuits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/04\/02\/today-in-bullsh-ip-lawsuits\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in Bullsh%$ IP Lawsuits"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>AM General just had a lawsuit it filed against Activision thrown out.<\/div>\n<p>The lawsuit claimed that the <i>Call of Duty<\/i> game <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/2020\/04\/us-judge-first-amendment-protects-call-of-dutys-use-of-humvees\/\">violated AM General&#8217;s trademark on its Humvee truck<\/a>:<br \/>+ <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">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&#8217;s claims of trademark infringement and false advertising for the in-game use of the military vehicles. <\/p>\n<p>The ruling stems from a lawsuit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-activision-amgeneral\/humvee-maker-sues-activision-over-call-of-duty-idUSKBN1D828F\">first filed by AMG in 2017<\/a>, which suggested that Call of Duty players were being &#8220;deceived into believing that AM General licenses the games or is somehow connected with or involved in the creation of the games.&#8221; That&#8217;s not a completely ridiculous idea, since Activision and other major game manufacturers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2019\/08\/how-video-games-license-guns\/596296\/\">generally arranged licenses for their in-game guns until 2013<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/humvee.pdf\">his ruling this week<\/a>, though, District Judge George B. Daniels dismissed AM General&#8217;s claim. That decision hinged in part on <a href=\"https:\/\/law.justia.com\/cases\/federal\/district-courts\/FSupp\/695\/112\/2345732\/\">a 1989 precedent<\/a> that established that artistic works could make reference to outside trademarks as long as the usage was relevant to the work and did not &#8220;explicitly mislead as to the source of the content or work.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We really need to reign in excessive IP protections.<\/p>\n<p>They do not serve the needs of society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AM General just had a lawsuit it filed against Activision thrown out. The lawsuit claimed that the Call of Duty game violated AM General&#8217;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 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[561,428,407,690,471],"class_list":["post-176732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-gaming","tag-ip","tag-justice","tag-trademark","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176732"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}