I would imagine there was a lot of posturing and delaying involved. No Man’s Sky doesn’t actually need the trade mark until close to release in UK. Sky TV can’t actually do anything legally until the trade mark is used in the UK.
This all means no one had any real incentive to resolve the issue until close to release time.
This.
At the moment if I buy Panadol I can be fairly certain who made it, and that it meets some quality standards. Does anyone really want to give that up?
Trademark could be tweaked to be more sensible. But the fundamental idea is still sound and relevant.
It’s worth noting that you can still use all of these words. You will just need to have sensible agreements in place with other trade mark owners to make sure you don’t step on each other’s turf.
Sensible like candy crush crushing the game it took inspiration from?
I don’t believe it, it mean you have the resources backing to face the kind of agreement without being bullied to oblivion.
The trade mark likely is on Sky TV. There are probably also trade marks on Sky Digital, Sky 3D and so on (at least in NZ, I assume the UK brands are similar). One could reasonably expect that No Man’s Sky might one day release Sky: Expansion. This suit was likely about getting all of the agreements in place ensure that doesn’t happen and consumers don’t get confused.
But surely the law makes a distinction between “Sky TV” and “No Man’s Sky” - and the countless other titles which contain the word “sky” (movies, books, etc). It’s hard to believe the law requires Sky TV to go after every single one of those.
If not, then how are we supposed to avoid a legal conflict in our titles? For example, my current game’s title has three words - “Black Pine Peninsula” - so which of these are part of someone’s trademark?
That’s what’s really at the center of this. Trademark law NEEDS to be tweaked. Indie gaming alone is producing thousands of games with different names. Imagine if one of the hundred thousand zombie game-devs out there suddenly decided “Dead” was their’s. Shit, you wouldn’t see a new indie game for months. Hm… maybe that’s a bad example of a downside :/.
In all seriousness though, drawing the line between what is/is not trademark infringement isn’t so difficult to necessitate the amount of horse crap our legal systems are going through.
I say all this, by the way, having gone through the process of establishing a trademark myself. It’s an arduous, expensive process that needs to be revisited. Not as sexy a political topic as immigrants though. OH well…
We ended up signing a deal with Zynga because their game “Dawn of Titans” was ridiculously close to ours. They were really nice about it and were able to put something down that said we were both proceeding with the understanding that our games were different enough not to cause issue. What I don’t understand is why that scenario can’t play out more often, especially for things like this where you have a completely generic noun as the source of trouble.
Man, I’ve got to stop coming on here when I’m smashed.
I seem to remember hearing or reading somewhere a factual/or suspected conspiracy (I’m to lazy to look it up), sometime in the 90’s there was a purposeful initiative to decrease the processing times and increase the patent and trademarks in US and UK.Why?
Money of course - without any thought of the repercussions down the line.
Don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s awful suspicious when everything in the US government moves at a crippled snails pace - except patent and trademark processing.
Looking at the numbers - it looks like a steady year over year increase - rather than a jump in any particular year. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm
Couldn’t find any meaningful info on number of copyright or trademarks.
Maybe we could all start branding like Prince did - the symbol.
I feel like if I was the lawyer for the No Man’s Sky people, I would have been like
“I challenge your Trademark of the word ‘sky’, On the grounds that as stated in Article 1 of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activites of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, ‘The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.’ and since the sky is indeed part of outer space, and since outer space is the common heritage of mankind, you have no right to trademark the sky. As such, your honor, I move to annul these proceedings. Furthermore pull a mic out of my pocket and drop it”
Technically speaking that big blue thing we call the sky is inside the earths atmosphere… So this one would not work. Even if the treaty held any real weight as international law.
What do you mean inside the Earth’s atmosphere? It is the Earth’s atmosphere. Although if you want to get completely technical about it we can only claim half of it while it is day since the color comes from the way the Sun’s rays are hitting it.
What we’re talking about here is way outside of the realm of “sensible”, though. It’s a common word and there’s no chance of confusion between those brands. I find it very difficult to see Sky as a “victim” here (unless they took it upon themselves to pay any and all costs incurred to the dev team as a part of this). Sure, they may feel like they were forced into aggressive litigation, but that only happened because they chose to trademark a word that everyone on the planet already uses.
I understand that there probably wasn’t any real legal danger to anyone here, and that it was probably just a bunch of letters between lawyers, I just can’t think of it as anything but a waste.
This is an excellent point and something Blizzard talked about a few weeks ago when they were forced to shut down a private vanilla server. It is simply the case if too many people know that someone is breaking your trademark, and you refuse to enforce your trademark, then you might lose it.
I am also changing my name to ´ the artist formerly known as Sky´
