You get the sense that Marvel could’ve/should’ve jumped on Irrational Games back in aught-2 for Freedom Force, but since that game wasn’t making a ton of money, it didn’t set off their lawyers’ spider-sense (or money-sense, or what have you). Fans ended up making custom models and custom heroes that were obvious clones of Marvel characters (Spiderman, Captain America, etc.) practically the day that game shipped.
If this goes through court, you have to wonder what impact it might have on the new Freedom Force.
Decision made in Marvel’s favor could also set a dangerous precedent that would weaken the standing of original IPs versus licensed ones even further.
Already hard enough to break into the crowded game market with an all-new original IP, especially when you’re competing with the likes of established game properties like Grand Theft Auto and Halo, and established non-game licensed IPs like Marvel (currently held by ATVI) and Star Wars (LEC). If Marvel actually wins and the case does set a precedent, a lawyer might be able to argue that your original IP has just enough elements/features that resemble an existing IP to make you guilty of infringement, so that you end up getting shut down, especially if you don’t have the deep pockets of an NCSoft to defend yourself. That’s in addition to the challenge your original IP already faces of sharing shelf space with already-known brands that consumers are already more likely to buy due to brand recognition.
Perhaps the difference is that NCsoft/Cryptic continually makes money with a subscriber base and these supposed-IP violations while single-player games like Freedom Force do not.
Freedom Force = You pay once, you do mods, etc. for it all you want, but it’s all free
City of Heroes = You buy it, make your hero, continually pay someone every month for the right to use it.
Also with COH, ity’s the ncsoft servers holding this content, with FF they could just say boo to a fansite and be done with it, no reason to even involve irrational. With COH, they have to target the owner of the content, who runs the servers with the content, charges for the content and distributes the content and that is ncsoft.
Would this fall under essentially the same aegis as ISPs who were sued about their (paying) customers hosting copyrighted works on their web space? In those cases, the courts found that as long as the ISPs did a reasonable job of policing, they weren’t contributing to the infringement.
I think that’s the argument Marvel will make, but I just can’t see how they have any ground to stand on. As noted earlier, this isn’t a case of NCSoft allowing copyrighted images on their servers. All they have are images with certain similarities. Look, do you remember the old Mickey Mouse sex fiend caricatures by, I think, R. Crumb? Was there any question in anyone’s mind that Mickey Mouse was the character being represented in those strips? Is there any question that Disney would have shut him down if they could? Evidently they couldn’t.
The only thing that kept me playing CoH for a month was the fact that I named a character “Death Adder Jr.,” an axe tank who looked surprisingly like the dude from the Genesis version of Golden Axe. What made it great was that I would never speak to anyone, just hit a macro that went “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”
[i]“ADDER WANT TO GROUP?”
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA”
“???”
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA”[/i]
etc.
People in my group loved me, though, because I would always fight aggressively to the death, taunting everything to attack me. So when the guy pulling (or whatever) really borked something up, I would just suck it up and die, shouting “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA” all while the rest of the group ran like hell. Maybe that’s why I thought leveling up in CoH was too slow.
Basically, coming up with stupid characters like that (I also made a Spaceman Spiff character and went around KSing while narrating that same action), CoH kept me entertained for a while. If they were to aggressively enforce their “NO COPYRIGHTED CHARACTERS” policy, the game would probably really suck. Shrugs.
Of course, how many of Marvel’s characters are rip-offs of DC characters? Squadron Supreme, anyone? (Yeah, obvious “parody” elements, but still…) Hawkeye? Quicksilver? etc.
DC should sue 'em all, as every comic hero is a ripoff of Superman or Batman, depending on whether they have powers.
Well put, Denny. All this “similarity” talk is too much. However, if, as mentioned above, you can create a character named Daredevill, and make him look remarkably like DD, so that people in the game could “obviously” tell who it was, isn’t that an IP violation? I mean, if you look at Quicksilver, do you say “Oh, that’s the Flash”?
I do’nt know where to draw the line here…I’m sincerely asking.
The only thing that kept me playing CoH for a month was the fact that I named a character “Death Adder Jr.,”
Shouldn’t that be “Death=Adder”? :)
And, to rip off from OMM, if you want to go the Sega route, someone should create a character called Zeus. With, of course, only one response to everything: “May you rise from your grave.”
My understanding (and I’m not a lawyer, so take it with a grain of salt) is that the line is drawn where there is a reasonable chance that someone might mistake the character for the actual Marvel property. As in, you’d need to convince a jury that someone might see the fake Daredevill in City of Heroes and assume that Marvel had licensed their character to NCSoft, or whatever. In this instance, it seems like a sort of tenuous argument, at best.
Wouldnt they be both? Why would the stick to just one? Especially with all the uses of their brands going on (toys/toons/films/more than one comic line per character is common, etc…)
I honestly don’t think that Marvel is at fault here. It really cannot be coincidence that a “superhero-themed” game just happens to allow players to create characters that look surprisingly close to Marvel characters.
Any character creation scheme for a superhero game that’s even vaguely worthwhile is going to include enough options that a very large number of existing superhero characters are included. That’s not targetting, that’s flexibility. CoH has the strongest character creation tool I’ve ever seen, by several orders of magnitude, if you disregard commercial 3d modelling/animation tools. Sure, you could make a lot of the Marvel heroes - because they’re some of the billions and billions* of combinations that could come out of the hero editor, even if you assume that your color scheme is coordinated.
*[size=2]This is not hyperbole; it’s a literal statement. It might be a trillion or better combinations, just off of strict combinatorics.[/size]
There’s a few fairly blatant things though. The 3 claws thing (why 3? yes I know 3 just fits between the knuckles, but so what? it’s a GAME; this could have been easily averted), and that swept mask that Wolverine has - that particular combo could have been tweaked.
Someone mentioned the Spidey eyes; they’re not in the game, quite possibly for this reason. Yet the 3-claw concept isn’t just a costume option, it’s a whole archetype.
Admittedly, this is the only one I can think of. The Hulk thing doesn’t seem to apply since as someone mentioned…it’s a skin color, a size (and there’s tons of HUGE heroes in any given comic universe), and ripped up pants…pretty hard to pinpoint any IP in that. The Hulk also had a shaggy flattop and a very rectangular head/skull shape…these are NOT in the game. shrug
