Tag: Intellectual Property

Battle Vs. Chess Killed Off by Trademark Lawsuit

So I’m probably one of four people in the world who cared, but last Fall promotional material started appearing for an XBox 360 game produced by SouthPeak Games called “Battle vs. Chess.” In fact, Official XBox Magazine actually published a review of the game in their Holiday 2010 issue, saying,

The game’s core chess experience is outstanding, but where it really takes off is in its variations, many of which makes chess feel brand-new. One mode couples fog of war with random piece placement . .

Then the game’s release date kept being pushed back, and finally Gamestop and other retailers were saying it had been canceled. Finding information on why the game was canceled or delayed has not been easy, but apparently Interplay filed a complaint that the game’s title was too similar to its Battle Chess trademark.

On October 26, 2010, Interplay filed the following report with the SEC,

Item 8.01

OTHER EVENTS

INTERPLAY ENTERTAINMENT CORP. FILES TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT LAWSUITAND OBTAINS PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION TO PROTECT ITS BATTLE CHESS MARK
The Company filed a lawsuit against TopWare Interactive, Inc. to enjoin infringement of the Company’s federally registered Battle Chess trademark and to recover damages.  On October 21, 2010, the United States District Court, Central District of California, determined preliminarily that TopWare’s use of “Battle vs. Chess” in conjunction with a chess video game is confusingly similar to Battle Chess.  The Court issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting use of “Battle vs. Chess” by TopWare, its officers, directors, affiliated companies, and those acting in concert with the foregoing.  “Battle vs. Chess” was to be co-published and distributed in the U.S. by SouthPeak Interactive Corporation.  Following the ruling, the Company will continue to protect  its intellectual property rights in the Battle Chess trademark against TopWare and others who are or may be contributing to the alleged infringement.

On the one hand, this is ridiculous. Interplay has not published a game with the Battle Chess name since 1994. On the other hand, how did SouthPeak Games and publisher TopWare not do even a minimal Google search on “Battle vs. Chess” which would have revealed the very similar name of the Interplay game before they got to the point where the game was actually finished?

The only thing certain in the high stakes world of video game development is the preponderance of poor business decisions.

Libraries Are Killing the Publishing Industry

GoToHellMan recently published a hilarious parody of publisher complaints about piracy Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion,

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book “lending” takes place in “libraries”. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a “card”. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.

The whole thing is hilarious and well worth reading. Keep it in mind the next time you read one of those idiotic “piracy cost X industry $Y hundred million.”

Brian Martin’s ‘Information Liberation’

Not sure where I ran across this anymore, but Brian Martin has posted the full text of his 1998 book Information Liberation online in both HTML and PDF format. This is hardcore information wants to be free stuff — what originally caught my attention was chapter 3, Against Intellectual Property, which argues for the abolition of intellectual property.

Pirates of the Amazon

Pirates of the Amazon is/was an interesting experiment that quickly got a cease-and-desist letter from Amazon.com. For a day, however, the site hosted a Firefox extension that assisted the user in pirating works for sale at Amazon. As TorrentFreak put it,

An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integreates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay.

. . .

When the add-on is installed, it integrates a new “download 4 free” button into the Amazon product page when the same article is also available via The Pirate Bay. It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and basically all products that can be converted to a digital format.

Now that is an interesting mashup. As TorrentFreak noted there are plenty of Greasemonky scripts out there that do much the same thing for Last.FM, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, etc. It’s not like it is rocket science to do this with Greasemonkey.

If you’re curious, TorrentFreak is maintaining a backup of the Firefox extension here.

James Boyle’s New Book ‘The Public Domain’

Yale University Press has just published James Boyle’s new book about the damage being wreaked by intellectual property laws, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle also has a website for the book at ThePublicDomain.org, where the book can be downloaded for free as a PDF (the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-Sharealike license).

According to the web site,

Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception.

. . .

With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the “range wars of the information age”: today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance.   The “enclosure of the commons of the mind” matters and it matters to all of us. “Boyle has been the godfather of the Free Culture Movement since his extraordinary book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens set the framework for the field a decade ago,” says Lawrence Lessig,  “In this beautifully written and subtly argued book, Boyle has succeeded in resetting that framework, and beginning the work in the next stage of this field. The Public Domain is absolutely crucial to understanding where the debate has been, and where it will go. And Boyle’s work continues to be at the center of that debate.”

Is “Intellectual Property” A Misnomer?

Tim Lee makes his case over at TechLiberation.Com for banishing the phrase “intellectual property.”

He gets off on the wrong foot with a bit about the current obsession, especially on the left, with the way in which issues are “framed,”

The words we use to describe the policies we advocate have a profound effect on how we think about them. Our choice of language has powerful effects in framing how we think about a subject.

The leading proponent of this idea is lefty George Lakoff and it is frankly nonsense. Certainly words may influence the debate at the margins, or where totalitarian governments are able to dictate what language is used (such as Nazi Germany’s “framing” of anti-Semitism), but even in the most extreme examples, the effects “framing” is vastly over-rated.

Typically when you find someone citing “framing” as a serious issue, you’ve found someone who is on the losing side of an issue. See, it isn’t that people have rejected your pet cause, but rather that your side just didn’t get “framed” properly. Once the “frame” is shifted, of course you’ll prevail.

What Lee dislikes is that the phrase intellectual property “suggests a misleading analogy to traditional property law,” but the major difference seems to be Lee’s view that traditional property law involves the state recognizing pre-existing property rights arrangements (which is a vastly oversimplified accounting of the rise of property rights), whereas intellectual property rights were created ex nihilo by governments.

Personally, I think “intellectual property” is very useful precisely because it is analogous with traditional property law. It accurately conveys exactly what contemporary copyrights and trademarks convey to holders of those monopolies — ownership of the work or mark in question, specifically the legal right to exclude others from using the copyrighted work or mark without permission.

As Cato’s Jim Harper puts it in the comments to Lee’s piece,

“Property” is a way of saying “thing.” The addition of the word “real” to make the phrase “real property” helps distinguish between movable things and immovable things. There’s no reason why we couldn’t adapt it to things that are products of cognition and volition and call them “intellectual property.” They have further distinct ‘properties’ that we should explore and discuss.

. . .

I think it’s better to take people on a long journey through all the conceptual and intellectual steps, using the most natural language possible, than to shortcut the process by banishing certain useful terms.