Ranger REG said:
So now what? We can't call the genre "cyberp-" ... err, the "C" word because if we do, we owe R. Talsorian a penny when we're not officially endorsing their product. What proper name we can give this genre type?
*chuckle* Don't be silly. RTG owns a trademark on "Cyberpunk" as a Roleplaying game
title. Not copyright on a single word (which I don't believe is even possible...). This has no impact on the usage of the word outside of being the title of a roleplaying game. I would even go so far as to say it is a fairly weak tradmark, as it is not a made-up or name unique to that trademark's object. There's a reason why names like 'Xerox' get made up - no one can argue that they should be able to use it one of their trademarks because it was 'in common usage' before being trademarked. That weakness in the case of cyberpunk would tempt me to make up a different game title, but feel pretty confident in using the word "cyberpunk" in the tag line and/or on the back cover text as necesarry to describe the product. In other words...
"Ice and Chrome
A d20 cyberpunk experience"
...would be perfectly legit on a book cover. You haven't chanlleged the trademark, because your game's title is 'Ice and Chrome', and the tag line is descriptive text, not TM material.
Ran into the same probelm with
Spycraft way back when. At one point we were looking at releasing it as "Cloak and Dagger", but Marvel had extended their trademark of the Cloak & Dagger comic series to include the RPG category (fairly standard practice for them so as to be able to publish games about their characters without interference), and we had to find a new name, even though as a concept, "Cloak and Dagger" hugely predates Marvel's characters, and in fact
Spycraft's content has more to do with the commonly understood concept of 'cloak and dagger' than that pair of characters ever will. No one stopped using the term in casual conversation just because Marvel filed a trademark. Nor should they
. Same thing with "spycraft" itself. There are plenty of other (non-gaming) books out there using that word in their title, but AEG owns the trademark within the RPG category. We just hedged out everyone else in using a commonly understood word, and I don't feel even slightly guilty about it
.
In this particular case, since RTG still holds that trademark, and it is listed as active, I'd lay my bets that the early anouncement is a working title.
