Having just played a game called Zombie Army 4, having recently fought zombies in various other games, and having recently seen several zombie movies, I can categorically state this is not correct! Generally, calling them something else is an element of world building. In Walking Dead, they do it to show that different communities have been isolated from each other since the collapse of civilization, and they’ve had to develop survival tactics separately, which is partly expressed by how they have different names for the zombies. Also, I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Walking Dead take place in a universe that doesn’t have zombie movies like the Night of the Living Dead series, so it might not even have the word “zombie”? I could be wrong about that. But Marvel’s trademark is news to me, and as @Menzo pointed out above, it seems the only place this was ever remotely leveraged is was in comic books.
This is important because, as I’ve said elsewhere, zombies are the last mythology that aren’t also an IP. From here on out – Star Wars, Harry Potter, Alien, you name it – any new mythology will be owned by someone.
Not picking on you @Daagar, because many of the articles listed above make this mistake. A copyright and a trademark are two very different types of intellectual property.
A copyright is what you get when you make a creative work. For example, the Harry Potter books are under copyright. That means that I cannot copy them and sell them myself, create and sell derivative works based off of Harry Potter, or create works that are essentially identical e.g. my new novel, Harold Potmaker and the Magical Rock. Copyright protections are strong, and apply to the creative element of a work. Things like individual phrases, recipes, and concepts do not get copyright protection, because they are not treated as “creative works” under the law.
A trademark is a word, phrase, image, etc. (a “mark”) that is used to identify a particular good or service. If you have a trademark, other people cannot use that mark to sells similar products. For example, if I roast some coffee beans, I can call them CF Kane’s Coffee Beans no problem, but if I call them “Starbucks Coffee” or “Caribou Coffee” or “Folger’s Coffee,” I am taking advantages of someone else’s trademark to sell my products. That is illegal, and the owner of the mark can sue me and basically take everything I made from selling “Starbucks Coffee.”
Trademarks need to be defended, and cannot fall into common use. That is why Google and Xerox fight hard against their names becoming verbs to describe using a search engine or making copies. If they are no longer associated with the product, they lose their ability to function as trademarks.
Marvel may well have trademarked zombie, but that probably doesn’t get them very far. Trademarks are generally pretty limited–the test is whether the trademark creates market confusion about who the source of the good is. So if Marvel has a comic book called “Zombie Tales,” and they have a trademark on “Zombie,” it means that some other comics publisher cannot call their book “Zombie Stories.” They can still write stories about zombies, but they are limited in how they market them.
You can search trademarks for free online. I did a quick search for marks containing “Zombie,” and there are 1052 results. If you limit the search to just the word “Zombie,” you get 45 marks, of which 14 or so are currently in active use. Purposes for the mark include hunting lures, “corn-based snack food,” and my favorite “programmable logic controllers that regulate a pneumatic mixing system used to operate municipal and industrial water and wastewater treatment systems.” You can see that search here.
Marvel registered a trademark for “Zombie” in 1973, and the mark was to describe goods and services, specifically “PUBLICATIONS, PARTICULARLY MAGAZINES COMPOSED OF COMIC AND NON-COMIC PICTORIAL AND STORY MATERIAL” (sorry for the caps, cut and pasting from the trademark registration system). The trademark was cancelled at the end of 1996, probably because Marvel was not actively publishing a book with Zombie in the title at that time. You can see it here: Trademark Search
People use trademark and copyright interchangeably, but they are really different in what they apply to and the types of uses they prohibit.
TL;DR: Marvel had a trademark on the use of the word Zombie to sell comicbooks, but they couldn’t stop anyone from using zombies in their creative works.
My use of Cf. as part of the name is intentional, because I am just that much of a dork. It is both a Citizen Kane reference and a legal citation signaling joke! I am very cool.
No worries - I don’t even play a lawyer on TV, so I use copyright/trademark interchangeably (and thus incorrectly) all the time.
That said, I’m surprised so many things don’t use the word ‘zombie’ then when they clearly are talking about zombies if it is really more free to use than I was thinking. Or maybe it is less things than I think based on Tom’s reply :)
I feel like this is going to be a huge hit. The game was functionally done in 2019, and Blizzard delayed it for years to polish it up and make it feel like a real Diablo as opposed to a NetEase mobile ARPG clone.
Oh, so it has controller support? That makes things more… difficult to resist, assuming it’s decent. Stream to the TV, pick up a controller, and I’m playing a new console Diablo!
That’s a fun surprise, I guess the game was delayed for so many years that they finished the windows port too. Reportedly the original mobile game was finished in like 2018 and blizzard delayed it to polish ever since.
I’ll try to keep an open mind, but Diablo 2 R is so freaking perfect I can’t imagine going back to Diablo 3 let alone a mobile version of it. However, new Diablo-3 like content will certainly be something I want to be excited about, and the fact that it’s available for Windows puts this back on the fringe of my gaming radar.
I had zero desire to play a mobile Diablo, but now that it has a PC port and the ability to use a controller (which some people seem to swear is the way to play D3) - now I’m kinda interested. And it looks less… mobile… than I expected.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a few posts of people playing pre-release versions that say it is mostly D3, but more fun. Possibly just because it is new, of course.
