JohnRTroy=win.
Thank you for your earlier lengthy post, it was very nuanced. You clarified some things about trademark law I was curious about.
Still, my gut reaction to this is that it's unjust. Lone Wolf seems to have gotten its legal high ground from a technicality. It would make sense to me that "Army Builder" wasn't contested for either of two reasons.
1) Developers of similar technology didn't include "Army Builder" in their trademark registration because they named their product something like "Roster Monster" or "ListLord" or "Jibberyjoo"...in other words they gave their product a proper name rather than naming it by exactly what it did. In the minds of these developers, "army builder" was likely a phrase they used to describe their product's function.
2) There simply wasn't an attempt by another firm to compete with Lone Wolf, either because of a perceived insufficient market or because those people developing similar tools had no intent to market them for profit. In this latter, and I think much more likely case, Lone Wolf is asserting a right to preclude these other people from using a term common in wargaming parlance simply because the private developers had no desire to enter the market competition.
This strikes me as unfair. People make these excel tools, and they should be well within their rights to distribute them freely among their peers if they want to. It seems to me that Lone Wolf is concerned with losing profits due to competition by these freeware tools, but they know they don't have a copyright claim so they're asserting a trademark dispute instead. Amusingly enough, it's a trademark that nobody was even aware of.
I think it's important to distinguish Army Builder from products like Xerox, cellophane, elevator(escalator?), thermos, Google, etc. All of the members of the latter list became words in common use because the general population over time came to consider the product name as synonymous with its function. I personally only say I'm going to Google something if I intend to use Google's search engine, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who think of "googling it" as meaning generally to perform a web search. Similarly, Thermos became so popular that people think of any receptacle meant to keep their liquid item at its desired temperature over time as being a thermos. Now turn back the clock. Before Google became a firm, would it ever have occurred to anyone to refer to web searching as Googling? Would anyone have thought to say "xerox" when they meant "make a copy of"? Nope, not at all.
Army Builder, on the other hand, is a phrase that certainly existed before Lone Wolf registered their trademark. I don't know enough to dispute their claim that they are the reason it's a ubiquitous term, but I'm leaning to the side of that claim is false. Keep in mind that I'm not arguing per existing law, I'm just arguing from a basic perspective of fairness; I don't know much about trademark law. My basic problem here is that Lone Wolf is claiming all these rights to their mark that I didn't know existed. Until today, I had no idea there was a software specifically called "Army Builder." I've heard the term used since I was in middle school (when I was exposed to Warhammer), and I always assumed it referred to some tool or program that helped one build their army list. Before today, I would have referred to any excel tool or published software that performed that function as "an army builder" without any knowledge of the product from which the phrase supposedly originated. Lone Wolf hasn't been around long enough to claim the venerable status of the genericized mark. Escalator is in the dictionary as a word because it has been around for a really really long time, and nobody even remembers when it was a brand name. "Army Builder" is being used in common parlance simply because it's a succinct way to describe the excel tools people are making on their own, and this has nothing to do with the brand. If I make a tool that helps me build an army, I'm not going to call it a roster generation tool...I'm going to call it an army builder. I think this is just a common sense argument in support of the proposition that Army Builder should be too generic to trademark.
Um...I could keep rambling, but I have Con Law to read
