Your first statement if factually wrong, you can't take someone else's copy-write by creating something and calling it the same name. It doesn't matter if they defend them or not.Oskuro said:
He probably meant trademark. For some asinine reason, in the States, you can indeed kill someone's trademark rights to a brand name if enough people use it to refer to things other than their products. (Like using "putt-putt" as a nickname for mini-golf in general. Probably why this company has taken to sending legal notices to everyone and their cat.) It's a law that has only caused problems for rightsholders and the general public alike, but there's never been a concerted effort to repeal it.Worgen said:
Unless you can point to where trademark law says that, I'm calling bs. The only way I can see common usage having any chance of invalidating a trademark is if the morons who claimed the trademark were trying to trademark some common word, like 'monster' or 'edge' and were vigorously trying to prove that it was theirs by endless lawsuits, which has happened and it bit the 'edge' guy right in the ass.Steve the Pocket said:
General harassment = American judicial system = Money. Why make money honestly when you could use lawsuits?Roander said:
You are wrong, it's a legal concept called trademark dilution. For example, Google has to continuously defend their trademarks (see http://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/rules.html ), as "google" has become synonymous with searching for something on the Internet. Many words like heroin, aspirin, hoover and video tape used to be trademarks but lost their protection as they became generic terms.Worgen said:
Okay, what? Stop me if I'm on the wrong track, but does that mean that if I'm actually infringing copyright (e.g. making a blatant Sonic the Hedgehog clone) and I get a letter, I can just ignore it and hope that it was just one of those automatic-C&D letters?Aedes said:
For some reason I can still recite the intro song from 'Putt Putt saves the zoo' word for word... Kind of worrying since I have a pretty bad memory otherwise...Halyah said:
well, when someone made a mod for GTA game, rockstar was forced to remove all the existing gmaes form the market and repalce them with ones that do not allow mods.Roxor said:
Infernal Lawyer said:
and yet currently it is supported by both the public and the government and even made mroe rigerous with variuos SOPA variant attempts. the whole copyright system has to be completely scrapped and redone because it was created solely to benefit people with most money.Roxor said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurantsbalberoy said:
