Minecraft Forums

Quote from Swiftykitty2K

This lawsuit isn't going to sail. As Rock Paper Shotgun stated here, suing Mojang for the community's creations is like suing Crayola for what someone drew using their crayons. It's stupid.

That has never stopped a company from trying to extort money from another company they think they can force to settle because it's cheaper than fighting. Of course, look at how well that worked out for SCO.

Someone from TSR once came to my booth at GenCon and started in on how my products could be used to violate TSR's copyrights. I cut him off, and said yes, that was true. If they wanted to sue me, I'd wait in line behind Xerox, Lotus, and the Ticonderoga Pencil Company, since photocopiers, word processors (yeah, this was back in the WordPerfect days), and #2 pencils could be used for the exact same thing. Any shakedown artist looks for targets that will give in without a fight. Mojang is not that kind of company. I'm really looking forward to their reply. (has everyone here written to Putt-Putt and told them they don't get another cent of your money until they send a written apology to Mojang?)

There's a thing called "goodwill" that is as much of a business asset as buildings and desks. Somehow, I suspect Putt-Putt has slightly less of it than they had before they chose to make fools of themselves in public.

This coming weekend, I'm going to be in a place that has a Putt-Putt Family Fun Center, along with several other miniature golf courses. (yeah, tourist trap ... I'm actually going there on business) The odds are pretty high that I will play a game of miniature golf (because of this issue if for no other reason). I think we can all guess where I won't be playing. Though I suppose it would be rude of me to stop by the Putt-Putt franchise and wave my receipts from their competitors at the hapless staff. It's not their fault the CEO is a tool.

Mojang did more than sit back and laugh. They posted the C&D online so that all of us can laugh, too!

Quote from EpicTaco5

Don't remember them sewing when these games came out https://en.wikipedia...t-Putt_(series)

Despite appearances to the contrary, Putt-Putt's legal department is suers, not sewers.

All sewage jokes aside, they didn't threaten to sue over the Putt-Putt computer games because those were about cars, not golf. Trademarks are specific to an industry. For example, Mojang owns "Minecraft" for computer games, and probably various auxiliary things, too, like the little square creeper face pin I have on my hat. But if some company is selling, I dunno, shoring braces for hard rock mines, they could use the name "Minecraft" for them, and have a trademark on it, because it's a different industry. Nobody is going to think computer games and mining equipment are connected.

In this case, the people making and uploading those videos were using the Putt-Putt name in connection with miniature golf. Videos of virtual miniature golf courses, yes, but still golf. That's trademark infringement. Putt-Putt is entitled to exclusive use of the trademark "Putt-Putt" in relation to golf. So they rightfully decided they needed to do something about that.

The problem (or at least source for mockery) here is that they then wrongfully decided that the way to do so would be to threaten the company whose software was used to create the infringing videos. In a sense, it's like them suing the Lego company because someone made a mini golf course with Legos and posted video of it.

Quote from pixelboss

So if I own a company, and my fans use putt putt as the title of let's play videos of a game my company makes, putt putt will sue me? That's the most ridiculous think I have ever heard of that any company did.

Yes, it appears that they will. Or at least they'll threaten to. And they'll also send out threats to people who don't even work for your company, just because the games that are being used by the infringers run on their platform.

Sadly, it's not the most ridiculous thing I've heard of any company doing. Apropos of the current topic, back in the early days of the personal computer industry, Texas Instruments had a nice computer, the TI-99/4. It had a 16-bit CPU when everything else was 8-bit. It had kickass speech synthesis (this used to be a big thing). It could have owned the industry. Except that TI threatened to sue any company that wrote software that would run on it. IBM, on the other hand, built a kind of second-rate computer. The original IBM PC wasn't nearly as good a computer as the TI-99/4. But IBM said "here's the specs, everyone, start writing code!" So people did. This is why we're not playing Minecraft on TI-99/256 computers. As I said in another thread, companies are made up of people, and people can do some amazingly stupid things. Let us never forget Microsoft Bob! (as much as a lot of people, probably including Microsoft, would like to). Or the Star Wars Christmas special that even George Lucas would like to track down and burn every tape of.

I'm an evil person, and the thought crosses my mind that I should make a mini-golf course out of Legos, make a video of it, upload said video to YouTube, and wait to see them send C&D's to the Lego folks. I'd love to watch them walk into that meat-grinder. They'd be lucky if they came out of it owning a couple of golf balls and a bent tee.

Quote from Rasder

They probably have a bot that seds out hundreds of these daily.

Doubtful. First, they're targeting companies (presumably companies they think have deep pockets) rather than individuals. For instance, they threatened Mojang, not the people who committed the actual trademark infringement. There aren't 26,000 companies a year (assuming 100 letters a day, and giving them weekends off) who they could come anywhere close to connecting to trademark infringement. Second, if there were 26,000 C&D letters going out per year, Notch wouldn't have been the first person to post one for the amusement (or mockery) of the Internet at large. Oh, a human initiated this all right ... either a very stupid or a very greedy human, but a human nonetheless.