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Lone Wolf sends Cease & Desist letters to anyone using the term 'Army Builder'

So are you saying that we should not be stopping fan-created tools from using our trademark in their names? That flies in the face of what our IP attorney has told us repeatedly. Please explain, since it's conceivable our attorney is urging us to take actions that aren't actually necessary and that are just ticking people off without actually benefiting us.

Some IP attorneys may claim that offering of free fan-created software constitutes 'commercial use' of a mark: use in the course of a trade offering goods or services. My reading of the Lanham Act doesn't support that interpretation, but I am not an expert on it (I spend my time on the UK's EU-derived 1994 Trade Marks Act) and certainly some US judges seem remarkably willing to stretch the statutory definition.

Secondly, as a practical matter you don't want people using your mark as a generic term for a certain sort of software; you have a problem because your mark is highly descriptive of what that software does. But technically people could use the mark descriptively "I was so hungry, I hoovered up that seafood" while the mark itself remains distinctive.

So, IMO: "I use Zappot Beeblefutz software as my army builder" probably does not directly threaten your mark (this is a finely graded area though, no guarantees). And anyway it's not something you can or should take action against: here the phrase is used descriptively, which is a defense to an allegation of TM infringement, not distinctively, as a mark of origin.

(Incidentally, in the UK TM owners cannot lose their mark because it's used generically by the public, as long as other businesses don't use it generically).

None of this is to say that you should not take action against a product marketed by another company as "Zaphod Beeblefutz Army Builder" - you need to do that to avoid genericisation of the mark.

As a practical matter, I suspect that the commercial benefit to you of maintaining a monopoly over the Army Builder mark may be outweighed by the negative publicity that doing so gets you, but that's your call to make.
 
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Then I need to add this to the next conversation with our IP attorney. It's quite likely that I didn't grok something he told me here. Crap!

Yeah, it's quite complicated. :) Commercial law is not designed as a tool for the little guy, including the mom & pop business operator. Even medium-sized companies like TSR can often screw up badly when they try to deal with the law - big companies like Hasbro seem to usually have the resources not to make the obvious mistakes, but even they can get caught out.
 

Consumerist said:
Diebold was found to have violated section 512(f) of the DMCA, and ordered to pay $125,000 in damages and fees—which is something you may want to point out to anyone who misuses the DMCA against your own online content in the future.
Here is another guy who filed an errant DMCA takedown notice. I think it's amusing that a guy who wrongly used the DMCA to try to shut down bad publicity for himself was ordered as part of the settlement to make a video about it and give it to the defendant so he could post it online:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8srbIeV4B4]YouTube - Michael Crook Apologizes to the Internets[/ame]
 


Would you all people please just leave me alone, thanks?

iranzilla2.jpg
 

Two memes seem to be creeping up. The first whether or not Lone Wolf went too far. That's debatable (which is what we are doing).

The second thing is people are offended by the term "Army Builder" now being a trademark. While I've discussed this before, the following other terms are registered trademarks: Closet Builder, Profit Builder, Pipe Builder, Turf Builder, and Blossom Builder. These are also "common phrases", yet they were approved as well. Combining common words to make a trademark is a practice that goes back almost a century (as I said before--Coca-Cola). There are limits to the restrictions of Trademark law so it's not trying to restrict free speech.

It doesn't sound like they did anything "sneaky" because others have done it. Based on Rob's statements, it sounds like before the "5 year period" after approval they did inform others. And although somebody said Army Builder was "google bombed", I think having an official site and a registered trademark is the reason why Army Builder shows their site as number one, because it was popular, not because of the recent events.

Legal notices are sent all the time. We don't normally see everything. If every company decided to publically air dirty laundry, none of you would ever enjoy gaming because people would keep getting caught up in he said/she said nonsense.

Gamers never forget and seldom forgive. Bad step for Lone Wolf.

Only if we're have eidetic memories and are all sociopaths or psychopaths. We're not.

To myself, this is a tempest in a teapot. The only thing that happened is one company probably got a little too overzealous, and another company decided to air that in public (which was bad form IMO). Nobody got sued, nobody got hurt, no lives were lost. (ENWorld IMO is actually exacerbating the issue by putting this on the front page.)

ETA: Ah, I see we are now resorting to 4chan style postings now...jeez...
 

"It's all so complicated!"

Do what people normally do when someone makes a ridiculous request. Ignore them. I'm willing to bet you could take any Web page, including Lone Wolf's, and run a match on all trademarks in its text and come up with 100 hits. Trademarking something doesn't remove it from the language. If LW feels like they have to spout off about it, let them.
 

Two memes seem to be creeping up.
<SNIP>

ETA: Ah, I see we are now resorting to 4chan style postings now...jeez...

Actually, it has been going on for almost a day now. You just don't know where to look.

Besides, as far as net publicity goes, 4Chan are the best at getting it done. :D
 
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