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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 8775474" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Racism and deceptive marketing aside, NuTSR is well within their rights to snatch up trademarks that WotC let lapse. The Star Frontiers and TSR trademarks have long since expired because WotC let them languish. WotC doesn't have any right to claim them now, and putting up low quality scans on Drivethrurpg after telling the fansite to take down their remastered PDFs is a jerk move that shouldn't count toward maintaining the trademark anyway. The trademark already lapsed sometime in the 90s I'm guessing since the last book was released circa 1985. Hosting PDFs shouldn't count toward maintaining a trademark, otherwise you could maintain a trademark forever simply because an ebook you released two hundred years ago is still being sold even though you did nothing with the IP since.It's a really frustrating situation because both sides are in the wrong here. NuTSR really is using deceptive marketing practices to trick fans of the Star Frontiers IP when they don't have any right to it. WotC doesn't have any right to the trademark anymore and shouldn't be allowed to try re-registering until NuTSR's claim lapses, because they clearly didn't care about the IP before and still don't unless they get bad publicity over it.One of the most telling acts here is that Sasquatch LLC already snatched the Alternity trademark and published their own retroclone a few years ago (it got cancelled and Sasquatch is now MIA, but whatever). This angered many Alternity fans who thought the IP was coming back only to learn it wasn't. What did WotC do then? Absolutely nothing. They still haven't restored the Alternity PDFs they removed back in 2008 during their infamous hissy fit over piracy. Word of advice WotC: the easiest way to prevent piracy is to sell PDFs legally, because when push comes to shove consumers will default to the option with the most convenience. Buying a PDF legally from an online store that will host the file for you indefinitely is more convenient that risking a malware infection or a lawsuit on the high seas.Also, copyright law should be reformed. There are so many orphaned works being lost to posterity because it is illegal for anyone but the copyright owner to maintain them. This fate has befallen many of my favorite obscure RPG supplements like Grim Tales/Slavelords of Cydonia, Alternity, the paperback Hogshead edition of Puppetland, Aether & Flux, Starship Troopers RPG, and many more. If corpos don't care to preserve nor profit off their IPs, then they shouldn't be allowed to prevent others from doing so. That's a grotesque miscarriage of the original purpose of copyright: allow a creator to profit for a time off his labors, then let anyone else preserve and remix the work.Anyway, if the judge rules in favor of WotC, then that would set a dangerous precedent for trademark by effectively allowing anyone to maintain a trademark forever. They do this just by registering it, posting an ebook on Kindle Unlimited, and then forgetting about it for centuries. This would prevent anyone else from ever registering that trademark ever again, even if the person who registered it has been dead for centuries or the company went out of business centuries ago. This would create the novel problem of "orphaned trademarks," which is similar to the current problem under copyright law where there are countless "orphaned works" whose copyright is either untraceable or held by owners who are deceased, out of business, apathetic, or don't even know they own it. This would be a bad thing for commerce and pervert the original intent of trademark law.Like, WotC is currently selling scans of the Amazing Engine RPG from the early 1990s. They haven't produced any books for it since the original printings and are almost certainly only selling the scans to reduce piracy. Do you think their behavior constitutes good faith maintaining of the Amazing Engine trademark, such that nobody else should ever be allowed to register it for as long as the PDFs are sold on Drivethru? I certainly don't. I'm no lawyer or judge, admittedly, but I think that's a perversion of the spirit of trademark law. When trademark law was created, we didn't have computers or the ability to easily make and sell infinite copies of a book's content. So claiming that using electronic storage constitutes maintaining a trademark is no different than claiming that libraries storing a copy of your book constitutes maintaining a trademark, since ebook stores are essentially privatized libraries.</blockquote>

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