What's the rule on full fledged rip offs of other IPs? Im seeing a lot of it

[Oubliette_Red]

Yes, I am talking about ttrpgs that I myself have written, hold copywrites and trademarks for, everything. I know I can do it without suing myself    ;D  but I am talking about having other players calling my characters out to GMs. If I create Quotient in CoH and I get reported to a GM, are they going to give me a chance to prove IP before I become GenericHero 25734, or after? Or are GMs just not enforcing this? That's what I want to know.

 

8)

 

As Jim Butcher did, you will likely have to live with the same issues should anyone recognize your character and report them.

[Zep]

Back in 2004, Marvel did sue Cryptic Studios over City of Heroes since it was possible to create a character resembling their IP in the character creator.  From what I recall, Marvel lost.

.

That aside, it's up to the Homecoming team if they want to enforce players creating homages or even outright ripoff of established characters from Marvel, DC, etc.  Personally, I don't see much reason to given that this whole game is currently unauthorized anyway and carries its own risks.

 

The reason Marvel did not win is because CoH's lawyer proved that they players that had created Marvel IP and play in game were Marvel employees. CoH had a reporting process in place and players were very proactive in self-policing because they did not want to see a repeat. The lawyer, by the way got a standing ovation at HeroCon.

 

As for the current Overlords, I don't think they've said anything, but just because this is not an authorized server doesn't mean Marvel/DC/etc won't swing a hammer.

 

Personally, I think it best to err on the side of caution and avoid characters that outright copy someone's IP.

 

I remember - I was at that HeroCon.

 

Paragon also agreed to ban names that were Marvel IP. That should continue to avoid the servers having the plug pulled.

[RikOz]

Personally, I think it best to err on the side of caution and avoid characters that outright copy someone's IP.

Yeah, I decided that one of my new characters in a blue & red costume, after playing him for a couple levels, could too easily look like Superman, or be accused of such. So I got rid of his red cape, and selected Super Jumping for his travel power rather than Flight when the time came.

[jubakumbi]

Paragon also agreed to ban names that were Marvel IP. That should continue to avoid the servers having the plug pulled.

 

Why?

This is not Paragon.

There is no claim of copyright, as there was in the retail game.

These are fan run, fan played.

 

I can show up at a gaming convention dressed like Supes.

 

This is just an online virtual gaming convention, not a retail product or service.

 

Please show me a valid law that can be applied here and I will back off, but until then, this is just FUD by people that do not understand copyright.

 

The reason Marvel could even try to sue previously was because the game publisher, though ToS and EULA, claimed copyright on all creeations.

 

NCSoft, Homecoming, no one is doing that here.

[Cerulean_Caver]

I mean, do we really want to give them an excuse? Supposedly people are in talks with NC to bring some legitimacy to all this. I'm sure one of our talking points is "This game is still relevant. Look at all the people playing."

 

And then they look and see "Batman, Baatman, Batmanz, Batmaan, etc.." Oh right. *That* headache.  ::)

 

 

[Khardis]

The equivalent would be driving around in a stolen car.

 

You don't drive around in a stolen car with a busted taillight.

 

While the penalty might not be that bad, you don't want the attention it brings.

 

With that said, I haven't actually seen any copycats, which is a bit surprising, honestly.

[Oubliette_Red]

The equivalent would be driving around in a stolen car.

 

You don't drive around in a stolen car with a busted taillight.

 

While the penalty might not be that bad, you don't want the attention it brings.

 

With that said, I haven't actually seen any copycats, which is a bit surprising, honestly.

 

I've seen 2 Dr. Stranges in the same play session and more than 1 Hulk.

[Panache]

Folks (read: the GMs) should keep in mind that in many cases, you're not talking about Marvel's attorneys; you're talking about Disney's. And they are infinitely more litigious and resourceful than Marvel could ever hope to be.

[Mr. Vee]

Folks (read: the GMs) should keep in mind that in many cases, you're not talking about Marvel's attorneys; you're talking about Disney's. And they are infinitely more litigious and resourceful than Marvel could ever hope to be.

 

Disney once famously C&D'd a daycare with a homemade Mickey Mouse mural. So yeah.

[justicebeliever]

Legal standing shouldn't be the question here.  You don't need legal standing to send a cease and desist letter.  Many groups have walked away from copyright battles that they would have won, but the legal costs were so high to victory that they just gave up. 

 

I agree with those saying "don't poke the bear".  Increasing the legal jeopardy of those working this project just increases the likelihood that this all disappears...Not saying it will or won't happen, but why take the risk?

[Zolgar]

Folks (read: the GMs) should keep in mind that in many cases, you're not talking about Marvel's attorneys; you're talking about Disney's. And they are infinitely more litigious and resourceful than Marvel could ever hope to be.

 

Disney once famously C&D'd a daycare with a homemade Mickey Mouse mural. So yeah.

 

That's actually a bit different:

 

A mural on the side of a for-profit business can be considered advertising for that business. While I may not agree with their interpretation, Disney saw the use of Mickey in the day care center's mural as the use of their IP in advertisement- which goes more to the realm of trademark than copyright, and trademark has to be protected or you lose it, unlike copyright.

 

There is no profit to be made here, and nothing we are doing is used to advertise the game.

The closest thing we can liken City of Heroes in its present state to, in terms of legal precedence, would be like Deviant Art (or any other similar site). If I make a Spider-man in game, I am essentially creating Spidey fan art. Sites like Deviant Art are still going strong, and are full of fan art of every IP known to man.

 

I am personally completely confident that this is such small potatoes that the bear we're not supposed to poke doesn't even notice us. We're like a fly buzzing around Kin King's foot.

[Atama]

More negative attention is bad. I would always suggest don't infringe, as that just adds fuel to the fire. Make something g original, and make it easier on the homecoming team.

 

QFT. Why poke the bear?  If you’re stuck on a name, www.thesaurus.com

Now I want to make a lizard man with a book named The Saurus.

[Dr. Gemini]

There are uncountable numbers of comic fansites across the web that use copyrighted material on every single page. I can find every costume of every hero ever created with a google search, which will show me page after page of scans from comic books, none of which have the copyright owner's permission to be posted. No comic book company has gone after any of these in recent history, despite the fact that it is inarguable that these violate their IP. CoH is no different when it comes to making copies of their characters. The Marvel suit was actually about removing competition for its planned Marvel MMO, not about copyrights, which is why DC didn't come along and do the same thing. For comic book companies, fans playing Marvel/DC characters, just like fans putting up a random page or scene from a comic book, is advertisement. What they care about is using their IP to profit or advertise your own business.

[Roughtrade]

Please show me a valid law that can be applied here and I will back off, but until then, this is just FUD by people that do not understand copyright.

Your naïveté is astounding.  Of course Marvel could sue this fan based show, the same way for many years Lucas nuked any Star Wars fan site.  If a company doesn’t protect its copyright then they can lose it.  If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law. 

 

Yes, the people here could argue fair use and not for profit, but they would have to hire lawyers and file paperwork and generally deal with the grief and garbage.  That’s how these things work.  You don’t have to be right, you just need more money.  And taking out this project takes less money than Disney’s lawyers lose in their couch cushions. 

 

To date, nothing is happening. That could change on a dime.  It would be great if this was all just wasted breath, an exercise in philosophy.  But to think no one will take notice when we’re getting weekly articles in Massively and some people are again negotiating with NC Soft is simply refusing to deal with reality. 

[Zolgar]

Please show me a valid law that can be applied here and I will back off, but until then, this is just FUD by people that do not understand copyright.

Your naïveté is astounding.  Of course Marvel could sue this fan based show, the same way for many years Lucas nuked any Star Wars fan site.  If a company doesn’t protect its copyright then they can lose it.  If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law. 

 

Actually no.

 

If you do not protect a TRADEMARK you can lose it. You cannot lose a copyright for not protecting it.

[SwitchFade]

Please show me a valid law that can be applied here and I will back off, but until then, this is just FUD by people that do not understand copyright.

Your naïveté is astounding.  Of course Marvel could sue this fan based show, the same way for many years Lucas nuked any Star Wars fan site.  If a company doesn’t protect its copyright then they can lose it.  If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law. 

 

Actually no.

 

If you do not protect a TRADEMARK you can lose it. You cannot lose a copyright for not protecting it.

 

Essentially, he is correct. My family is in patent law. Litigation in these matters is so astronomically expensive, that unless you have the financial clout of Disney, just defending against litigation is financial ruin. Why even risk it?

[Zolgar]

Please show me a valid law that can be applied here and I will back off, but until then, this is just FUD by people that do not understand copyright.

Your naïveté is astounding.  Of course Marvel could sue this fan based show, the same way for many years Lucas nuked any Star Wars fan site.  If a company doesn’t protect its copyright then they can lose it.  If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law. 

 

Actually no.

 

If you do not protect a TRADEMARK you can lose it. You cannot lose a copyright for not protecting it.

 

Essentially, he is correct. My family is in patent law. Litigation in these matters is so astronomically expensive, that unless you have the financial clout of Disney, just defending against litigation is financial ruin. Why even risk it?

 

I was just calling him out for making erroneous claims about copyright law, while saying "If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law."

 

I know full well that Disney doesn't need solid legal grounds to throw a suit at the server, they need only suspect they have legal grounds. I also know full well that should such a suit be thrown against the server, the server would be unable to fight it, even if it was completely bogus and had no real grounds. Granted, I don't think it would be a full on lawsuit, nor do I think it would lead to the server being shut down right away. It would probably just be a C&D which would lead to the devs here implementing a policy akin to the one that Paragon/NCSoft had about copyright characters.

[Player2]

Let's have a little legal lesson regarding trademark law and why Marvel HAD to sue City of Heroes.

 

A significant piece of trademark law, as opposed to copyright, is that it must be actively defended or the owner can be considered to have abandoned it.  For example, if someone made a Spider-Man clone in the old days, technically NCSoft was profitting off of Marvel's IP because they were collecting a monthly fee to play the game where said clone was created.  These days, there is no profit being made here, so the chances of Marvel outright suing are a whole lot less likely.  There's also chance they can make the game go away now because the code is in the wild and anyone can run it with the proper resources.  What that means is that maybe Marvel spends money getting their lawyers to file a cease & desist order and/or possibly get this server shut down.  But they'll know it's one server while many more could pop up at a moment's notice.  Because no profit is being made, the need to defend the trademark is relaxed.  If you're not using the trademark to make a profit, you're not challenging the owner of that IP on whether or not they want to fight to keep it.

 

What constitutes a trademark infringement?  This is a good one, because I recall people being absolutely fearful that Marvel's lawsuit would shut the game down and after it was dismissed that they (or DC or whoever else) would sue again ANY time there was a character that seemed to rip something off from somewhere else.  As someone else pointed out earlier in this thread, pretty much everything is a ripoff of something else these days.  While it can seem a little odd what constitutes an infringement, such as the time that the Fighting American character --a shield throwing Captain America ripoff-- lost the right to throw his shield.  It was a thing that was fairly unique to Captain America.  While the lawsuit also addressed the whole character of Fighting American as a ripoff, he was allowed to continue being published with no changes to his look or name, other than not being able to throw his shield as a weapon anymore.

 

For a character to be trademarked, it must be legally distinct.  Fighting American's costume, although patriotic, differed enough from Captain America's to set him apart as a unique character.  As did the name Fighting American.  If he were called Captain American, you can bet that would have been changed by court order.

 

I remember seeing a COH character in the past called Firestorm, and people were flooding the broadcast channel with attacks and threats to report him because it would bring down the wrath of DC.  However, the word "Firestorm" is a word in the dictionary and cannot be trademarked --not on it's own.  To trademark a word or name, it must be unique.  One way to do this is to create a unique spelling that makes it distinct from whatever it might be similar to.  Another is to add additional words to create a title, such as Fury of Firestorm or Firestorm the Nuclear Man.  And yet another way would be to trademark the appearance of the name, such as the uniquely designed fonts for comic book cover titles.  As works of art, they are a visual representation of the word(s).  The COH Firestorm example above would be exempt from a DC Comics lawsuit because the character looked nothing like DC's Firestorm character and did not claim to be a Nuclear Man.  Actually, the character was rather unoriginally named after the chosen powersets of Fire Control and Storm Summoning, again setting it apart from the legal distinction of DC's character.

 

You CANNOT trademark mythology... exactly.  Marvel owns Thor?  No... no they don't.  What they own is a trademark on their likeness of Thor, as well as the various title designs, and some of the title he's most famous for in Marvel Comics:  The Mighty Thor.  Anyone could publish Thor in a comic, and in fact has.  Image Comics had Supreme and at one point mirroring the Marvel Story where Beta Ray Bill took Mjolnir from Thor and Odin put the two through challenges to prove who was more worthy... in Supreme's comic, he defeated Thor and got to keep Mjolnir (and they were calling him Supreme God of Thunder for awhile).  While the copying of the overall theme and various elements look like they could be a copyright infringement (but copyright isn't my specialty, so I'll avoid speaking to how they worked around that), Image published their own likeness of Thor, Mjolnir, Odin, and Asgard.  Because the mythology exists in the public domain, like words such as Firestorm.

 

You have to be careful of the specifics with using public domain stuff, but essentially knockoff characters can be valid as long as they are legally distinct.

 

 

Side note:  Parody

 

Parody can be a tricky subject with regard to copyright and trademark law.  There is indeed a fair use of such material under the heading of parody.  However, NCSoft/Paragon Studios made the rules of the game and were ultimately liable for their customers' creations.  Rather than risk lawsuits and/or trying to compel the offending customer(s) to testify with their explanation for how the parody should be allowed when a lawsuit from the IP owner comes, it was easier for them to simply issue a zero tolerance policy on anything that looked like trademarked properties to avoid lawsuits as best they could.

 

So relax, Marvel isn't coming to shut this game down because no one is profiting off their intellectual properties.  It's no different than if someone were to draw those trademarked characters for their own (or others') entertainment without asking for money or trying to publish them in any way.

 

Adendum:  Legally distinct does not necessarily cover specific characters' secret identities.  Did you know that Clark Kent appeared in Marvel Comics?  It was an issue of Thor, and it was a perfect likeness and he was a reporter on assignment with his partner Lois.  The names "Clark" and "Kent" --even in that very well known combination-- are too common and cannot meet the legal definition of legally distinct.  Likewise, the mild mannered reporter in glasses look was also too ordinary, even though every fan knows who he really is, to be legally distinct.

 

Some things are just not able to be sued over.  Others can.  Did Lucasfilm sue a bunch of fan websites for infringing on their Star Wars IP?  Yes.  How well did that turn out?  Yeah, it had some impact in the short term, but it didn't last.  And with that as a precedent, you can be certain that lawyers would know that even if they shut down the Homecoming server, others will be out there and even this one could eventually return.  The trademark isn't being challenged in a way that needs to be defended, and while Disney has the money to burn, that's all they'd be doing.  Well, that and pissing off a number of comics fans, earning them more bad press.

[jubakumbi]

I mean, do we really want to give them an excuse? Supposedly people are in talks with NC to bring some legitimacy to all this. I'm sure one of our talking points is "This game is still relevant. Look at all the people playing."

 

And then they look and see "Batman, Baatman, Batmanz, Batmaan, etc.." Oh right. *That* headache.  ::)

 

That thinking is just FUD, IMO, just fear of Lawyers. :)

 

All games face this, in all genres, it is nothing new.

 

This mantra of 'in talks' also means nothing, it's been that way since 2012, IMO, and protects nothing.

 

Acting in fear will accomplish nothing but scaring players, IMO.

 

[_NOPE_]

There's nothing in the Code of Conduct. They are a non-profit LLC. Until they get some concerns or a C&D from some combic book company, I wouldn't worry about it one bit.

[subbacultchas]

Let's have a little legal lesson regarding trademark law and why Marvel HAD to sue City of Heroes...

 

Just want to give some props for a very informative post. Copyright and Trademark Law are about as clear as mud at times, and people's fears often give them more power than they have in actuality. So it's very nice to see someone break those down, I'm very familiar with copyright but not so much with trademark infringement.

 

Keep up the good work, guy or gal.

[Marshal_General]

I created a character named The Cosplay Avenger. All of her costumes are based off of comic and computer game heroes.

[Roughtrade]

Actually no.

 

If you do not protect a TRADEMARK you can lose it. You cannot lose a copyright for not protecting it.

Essentially, he is correct.

 

I was just calling him out for making erroneous claims about copyright law, while saying "If you are going to argue copyright law, please show some familiarity with copyright law."

Thank you for proving my point. 

 

If you do not think copyrights can be lost you should talk to the Estates of Tolkien, (who defend theirs) vs Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rhomer and, well, anyone who’s work fell into public domain and had Disney turn it into an animated feature because they did not.

[Roughtrade]

I created a character named The Cosplay Avenger. All of her costumes are based off of comic and computer game heroes.

And that is fine, and complete different than making up exact copies of computer and comic heroes and using exactly their same name.

[jubakumbi]

I created a character named The Cosplay Avenger. All of her costumes are based off of comic and computer game heroes.

And that is fine, and complete different than making up exact copies of computer and comic heroes and using exactly their same name.

 

But far more entertaining than grousing about the characters others are making!