I saw that the other day, it's pretty fantastic. Trademarking "Candy" and "Saga" is pretty absurd. Trademarking "Candy Crush Saga" is perfectly reasonable. We'd also accept "Candy Crush".
I can understand 'Saga' because their grand plan is to have 25 x-saga games (like Zynga did with -ville). If they do that and other people start making similar facebook games called x-saga then that would be unfair to King. I don't know if they have any other recourse in that instance, but they should be able to protect their brand.
It's different from Zynga's "-ville", because Zynga creates new words that have never (or very rarely) been used. It's different from Apple's i-Things as well for the same reason. Both of those companies made prudent decisions about their brand trademarks by not treading on anyone else.
The law should not allow companies to own common English words in perpetuity. If you want to make your brand a common English word, you should accept the fact that other people get to use it.
I doubt King will win any lawsuits against others who use the words.
Both of those companies made prudent decisions about their brand trademarks by not treading on anyone else.
Actually Apple ran into some trouble with, say, there already being software called IOS before any of the iThings existed. They've been to court over it a few times.
There's a different takeaway here. There are lots of other companies that are using the i- prefix for their products and yet Apple continues to thrive.
Most games tell a story of some kind, and sagas are a type of story. The idea that one company gets a lock on that word is ludicrous. "A first-person fantasy-based RPG called 'Dragon Saga'? Sorry, you can't have it because a tile-matching game has trademarked the word 'saga'".
It's a bit like being able to trademark the term 'movie' - should the makers of 'Scary Movie' be able to stop other films from having 'movie' in the title?
I watched my son playing Candy Crush for a few minutes and I don't see even a hint of a saga in that game. Can you get a patent on the process of misusing English words to back up your trademark?
The worst part is one of the main definitions of saga is "long story of heroic achievement, esp. a medieval prose narrative in Old Norse or Old Icelandic." Banner Saga is pretty much the perfect fit.
They chose "Saga" knowing that it had a long history of use in a great many games that are very well known to gamers, so that's something they should have to live with. Stealing (i.e. actually depriving others of) the use of parts of language is not inherently reasonable to me.
Also, what ever happened to trademarks? I thought they were defined as adjectives and 'Saga' is clearly a noun in every use I've seen....
For purposes of a trademark, actually, yes. From Apple's own site [1], "Trademarks are adjectives, and should not be made into verbs or made plural or possessive." In addition, Apple specifies a list of suggested generic terms for each trademark. Under Guidelines for Using Apple Trademarks and Copyrights, some concrete examples are given [2]: "Correct: I bought two Macintosh computers." but "Not Correct: I bought two Macintoshes."
- Apple says this because it doesn't want its trademarks to become common words ineligible for trademark protection (like what happened to xerox and kleenex). But it can't stop people from referring to things however they please; this is nothing more than a statement of how Apple wishes the world would work.
- If I say "I bought two Apple computers", Apple is still a noun, not an adjective.
A trademark is any distinguishing mark that indicates a product comes from you. The whole idea ("trade mark") is that it gives you a way to let people know which products are yours and which are competitors / unrelated / what have you, or, viewed from the mirror perspective, to let customers in the market know that they're buying what they think they're buying. That's why a central test of trademark violation is whether a customer would be likely to be confused between two marks.
They can be anything at all, such as entire phrases ("made from the best stuff on earth"), symbols (like the Apple apple), or particular colors, like the distinctive blue that Mauna Loa uses in their macadamia nut packaging (or the distinctive blue that Tiffany's uses in theirs!).
Yeah, but they're supposed to be used as an identifier and the fact that they don't (and haven't, to my knoweldge) ever used it as an adjective only underscores the fact that it does nothing whatsoever to distinguish them.
While I could see Candy X Saga being marginally distinctive, I associate 'Candy' and 'Saga' very strongly with completely different makers and I believe that I am by no means alone. For me, 'Candy Land' comes first for 'Candy' and 'Saga' goes to the whole 'SaGa' RPG series.
Also, I don't like word thieves trying to steal language out from under us. Here, the usage of 'thief' being justified by the fact that they are attempting to deprive us of the use of the word through dodgy legal practices.
No. I'm pointing out how, in spite of that, I believe this mark as applied for is not distinctive in the least and to me creates confusion with the marks of people who used them in commerce first.
Then they patent Candy xxx saga. And begin pumping Candy Crush Saga, Candy Punch Saga, Candy Throw Saga, Candy Jump Saga. But both candy and saga should be in the game title.
Really? So, because a company wants to use the word "saga" in a line of products, they now own the word "saga"? Really?! Man, I totally should have grabbed the word "trilogy" last year before I wrote my last three apps.
The only problem with that is Saga is a common word in video game titles -ville not so much. If you swing by a game related site like http://www.gamefaqs.com/ and search for saga it will turn up more than a couple hundred games with saga in the title(including more than one game titled "Saga")
This is what happens when there's no downside (other than cost) to trademarking something. It doesn't hurt king to try, and the worst that happens is they don't get the trademark approved.
But when/if it does succeed, they are able to prevent anyone else from riding on the tail of their heavy marketing spend.
I don't like what they are doing, but they are just trying to maximize their profit, and also prevent their competition from free-riding off their marketing.
The post doesn't say that. The effects of getting a trademark on 'Saga' are both to prevent others from riding on their tail (while diluting the effect of their marketing) _and_ to prevent other products that want to use the word Saga for reasons unrelated to Candy Crush Saga. I imagine they only really care about the former, but the latter would happen anyway.
Uhhh, I have an Puyopuyo clone in the pipeline which I wanted to release soon (denied because of jagged graphics). This calls for CandyCandy, amirite?!?
The last line in the above link reads "if you want to contact me directly on this, or indeed any other aspect of what we do – please feel free to drop me a line at rz@king.com I look forward to hearing from you."
So if any of you want to drop King a line, go for it. Call them out on their BS.
The douchebag attorneys at the USPTO need some explanation for this madness. Given that King.com has successfully registered the "Candy" in Europe, doesn't mean it should be overlooked in America too. How can anyone actually trademark such an everyday word??
Those IP laws are the same things that underpin the GPL and other Open Source licenses.
Granted, trademarks can sometimes be silly, copyright terms far too long and software patents ridiculous but at heart they do provide some very strong value.
I wish a large, well-behaved, games company would produce a game (totally original, good, but simple), posing as an independent developer, publish it, wait for King/Zynga to clone it, then sue their asses off. Seems to me like they're only getting away with this because they can bully the small guys.
The problem is that game mechanics aren't really copyrightable. Pac-Avoid was likely removed for its obvious trademark infringement (oh, the irony) but you can get away with some pretty blatant ripping off by changing all the copyrightable assets.
It's all fun and games till someone loses a lawsuit.
The Tetris Company LLC has for years claimed copyright and trademark rights over all falling-tetromino games and sending out C&D letters to independent developers. The developers laughed it off, until TTC vs. Xio, in which a district court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff.
By doing something like this the developers are risking serious lawsuits, and the invalidity of the "candy" trademark really can't be established except in a courtroom. And I think most of the smaller devs will settle way before then.
TTC vs Xio involved a direct clone. The judge ruled in his ruling that the game rules and gameplay were not copyrightable. Indeed, the judge noted that games like Dr. Mario (a tetris-like) would not have violated TTC's copyright.
Xio's clone went beyond just rules and gameplay--it copied the dimensions, colors, and various art assets. Comparing screenshots of Tetris and Xio's clone, it would have been very difficult for most people, even those familiar with Tetris, to identify which was the original.
Xio’s game didn’t copy any art assets from anywhere, as I can tell you, since I made all the art for it. [Mostly over one weekend, as a volunteer favor to the developers.]
The colors were not copied from anywhere, they were picked, by me, with no reference to any existing art, using a careful process designed to maximize distinguishability. To be specific, I decided that the colors should all be clearly separated in CIELAB lightness and hue, and then chose which lightness to match to which hue based on the gamut of then-current iPhones.
The result is a bunch of “bright” colors. But lots of games want bright colors, because they are the most easily distinguishable, and having easily distinguishable colors makes a game easier to play.
As for the appearance of the bricks, I cooked up a dozen or so possibilities in Photoshop, and let the rest of the team decide which to use. Again, created in a few various styles, but not with any reference to any previous game.
Just look at the screenshots of Xio's clone and Tetris. They are almost identical. Now compare Tetris with tetris-likes such as Dr. Mario, and the difference is immediately apparent.
Copying assets doesn't just mean verbatim copy-and-paste. It includes recreating other assets such that they are virtually identical to the source material, as the art assets you apparently created were.
IANAL, but these are two different issues. We are discussing a trademark, not a mechanic. TTC never got any of their cases regarding trademark, precisely because no one called it tetris (which is not even a real word). King hasn't copyrighted match-3, and probably won't ever be able to (what with prior art with at least Bejeweled, and I'm sure others before that)
Even aside from all that, I think #candyjam is protected under fair use. The intent is very obviously parody.
In fact, it'll probably end up with someone participating in the jam that has a sizable legal team, and they could probably string up a class-action lawsuit for everyone in the jam, which would probably amount to huge settlement costs if King tried to pay their way out of court. Lose-lose situation for them; they shell out massive amounts or lose their trademark for not protecting it.
I think this is brilliant, but is slamming Apple's iOS approval process with *candy titles really the best way? Isn't there are risk that you are flooding it and causing delays for (sorry for the phrasing) legitimate developers in getting their apps approved?
Hate to cast a negative on this, as it DOES nicely illustrate the ridiculousness of the situation!
Thought experiment: What would happen if Apple allowed all these infringing games to stay in the appstore? They'd get a fine? Get sued? What if they then CONTINUED to let the ganes stay. Making a stand on trademarking... I mean, Apple can pay any fine thrown at them and the governemt can't really close them down... Can they? "Yo Cook, shut it down."
How does a state handle companies richer than some countries?
I think Penny Arcade sums up best how ridiculous this whole issue is: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/01/24
I saw that the other day, it's pretty fantastic. Trademarking "Candy" and "Saga" is pretty absurd. Trademarking "Candy Crush Saga" is perfectly reasonable. We'd also accept "Candy Crush".
I can understand 'Saga' because their grand plan is to have 25 x-saga games (like Zynga did with -ville). If they do that and other people start making similar facebook games called x-saga then that would be unfair to King. I don't know if they have any other recourse in that instance, but they should be able to protect their brand.
It's different from Zynga's "-ville", because Zynga creates new words that have never (or very rarely) been used. It's different from Apple's i-Things as well for the same reason. Both of those companies made prudent decisions about their brand trademarks by not treading on anyone else.
The law should not allow companies to own common English words in perpetuity. If you want to make your brand a common English word, you should accept the fact that other people get to use it.
I doubt King will win any lawsuits against others who use the words.
Actually Apple ran into some trouble with, say, there already being software called IOS before any of the iThings existed. They've been to court over it a few times.
They also license the name "iPhone" from Cisco. They reference it in the first few lines of the legal section in the settings panel.
There's a different takeaway here. There are lots of other companies that are using the i- prefix for their products and yet Apple continues to thrive.
But 'Saga' is an old, generic word that can apply to any epic story, so giving them the trademark for x-saga wouldn't be right...
Not only is it generic, but it is a word that has a long history of being used in the name of games well before "King" existed as a company:
http://www.mobygames.com/search/quick?q=saga&x=0&y=0
If Nintendo were to release a Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga sequel, would King be so "gracious" as to allow them use of the Saga term?
This whole situation highlights how ludicrous IP law has gotten in the past decade.
Most games tell a story of some kind, and sagas are a type of story. The idea that one company gets a lock on that word is ludicrous. "A first-person fantasy-based RPG called 'Dragon Saga'? Sorry, you can't have it because a tile-matching game has trademarked the word 'saga'".
It's a bit like being able to trademark the term 'movie' - should the makers of 'Scary Movie' be able to stop other films from having 'movie' in the title?
I watched my son playing Candy Crush for a few minutes and I don't see even a hint of a saga in that game. Can you get a patent on the process of misusing English words to back up your trademark?
The worst part is one of the main definitions of saga is "long story of heroic achievement, esp. a medieval prose narrative in Old Norse or Old Icelandic." Banner Saga is pretty much the perfect fit.
They chose "Saga" knowing that it had a long history of use in a great many games that are very well known to gamers, so that's something they should have to live with. Stealing (i.e. actually depriving others of) the use of parts of language is not inherently reasonable to me.
Also, what ever happened to trademarks? I thought they were defined as adjectives and 'Saga' is clearly a noun in every use I've seen....
Sorry? Apple is an adjective?
For purposes of a trademark, actually, yes. From Apple's own site [1], "Trademarks are adjectives, and should not be made into verbs or made plural or possessive." In addition, Apple specifies a list of suggested generic terms for each trademark. Under Guidelines for Using Apple Trademarks and Copyrights, some concrete examples are given [2]: "Correct: I bought two Macintosh computers." but "Not Correct: I bought two Macintoshes."
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/guidelines...
This is incorrect in multiple ways.
- Apple says this because it doesn't want its trademarks to become common words ineligible for trademark protection (like what happened to xerox and kleenex). But it can't stop people from referring to things however they please; this is nothing more than a statement of how Apple wishes the world would work.
- If I say "I bought two Apple computers", Apple is still a noun, not an adjective.
Even if they send C&D notes over improper usage?
A trademark is any distinguishing mark that indicates a product comes from you. The whole idea ("trade mark") is that it gives you a way to let people know which products are yours and which are competitors / unrelated / what have you, or, viewed from the mirror perspective, to let customers in the market know that they're buying what they think they're buying. That's why a central test of trademark violation is whether a customer would be likely to be confused between two marks.
They can be anything at all, such as entire phrases ("made from the best stuff on earth"), symbols (like the Apple apple), or particular colors, like the distinctive blue that Mauna Loa uses in their macadamia nut packaging (or the distinctive blue that Tiffany's uses in theirs!).
Yeah, but they're supposed to be used as an identifier and the fact that they don't (and haven't, to my knoweldge) ever used it as an adjective only underscores the fact that it does nothing whatsoever to distinguish them.
While I could see Candy X Saga being marginally distinctive, I associate 'Candy' and 'Saga' very strongly with completely different makers and I believe that I am by no means alone. For me, 'Candy Land' comes first for 'Candy' and 'Saga' goes to the whole 'SaGa' RPG series.
Also, I don't like word thieves trying to steal language out from under us. Here, the usage of 'thief' being justified by the fact that they are attempting to deprive us of the use of the word through dodgy legal practices.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?
No. I'm pointing out how, in spite of that, I believe this mark as applied for is not distinctive in the least and to me creates confusion with the marks of people who used them in commerce first.
You're trolling right?
Then they patent Candy xxx saga. And begin pumping Candy Crush Saga, Candy Punch Saga, Candy Throw Saga, Candy Jump Saga. But both candy and saga should be in the game title.
Really? So, because a company wants to use the word "saga" in a line of products, they now own the word "saga"? Really?! Man, I totally should have grabbed the word "trilogy" last year before I wrote my last three apps.
"Saga" is far too broad, and they have no fair claim on that.
I can understand 'Saga' because their grand plan is to have 25 x-saga games (like Zynga did with -ville)
I think that people can see that's their grand plan, but it's a bad plan that deserves neither respect nor trademark protection.
The only problem with that is Saga is a common word in video game titles -ville not so much. If you swing by a game related site like http://www.gamefaqs.com/ and search for saga it will turn up more than a couple hundred games with saga in the title(including more than one game titled "Saga")
Or when Facebook trademarked the words face and book.
Did they?
IMO even Candy Crush is pushing it, especially given there's a game called Candy Cruncher... which came out in 2002... and is a match-3 game....
The movie Wreck It Ralph rather centrally featured the fictional game Candy Rush -- prior to the release of Candy Crush.
Might even be where King got the idea for the name of their game.
Sugar Rush, not Candy Rush
"Milk my duds! They claim they own the word 'Candy'? And 'King'?!"
Featuring the character King Candy.
Also that Candy Crush looks to me like a copy of Bejeweled.
Bejeweled has square boards. Candy crush has shaped boards. There is not much variation in match three games but this is one of the big differences.
They aren't copies. This is like saying that every fps after quake is quake clone.
I would feel comfortable calling FPS games "quake clones" if they have sufficiently similar gameplay to Quake. Painkiller or Serious Sam come to mind.
This is what happens when there's no downside (other than cost) to trademarking something. It doesn't hurt king to try, and the worst that happens is they don't get the trademark approved.
But when/if it does succeed, they are able to prevent anyone else from riding on the tail of their heavy marketing spend.
I don't like what they are doing, but they are just trying to maximize their profit, and also prevent their competition from free-riding off their marketing.
So... Anyone that uses the term 'Saga' in the name of a game is trying to ride off of the coat-tails of Candy Crush Saga?
The post doesn't say that. The effects of getting a trademark on 'Saga' are both to prevent others from riding on their tail (while diluting the effect of their marketing) _and_ to prevent other products that want to use the word Saga for reasons unrelated to Candy Crush Saga. I imagine they only really care about the former, but the latter would happen anyway.
i Love the campaign.
Good on them! This whole debacle has angered me and I hope the little guys win.
I would have had no issue with trademarking "Candy Crush Saga", but that's it. Ffs, King's games are already clones of other games.
Europe is not a country. And European Union is not a country either.
Who said it was? I don't see that in the article or comments.
It does, however, have a common trademark office.
Awesome, my site, http://itch.io, is hosting the jam. Tell me if you have any questions.
that's a very cool site some of the games were actually very fun and weird (like 90s weird) in a good way
Cool site! I will have to give this a closer look later.
I eagerly await the day some shameless company begins trademarking prepositions and punctuation.
I should trademark replacing trailing s with z.
Uhhh, I have an Puyopuyo clone in the pipeline which I wanted to release soon (denied because of jagged graphics). This calls for CandyCandy, amirite?!?
Here is the response King posted a couple of days ago: http://about.king.com/about/our-approach-to-ip
The last line in the above link reads "if you want to contact me directly on this, or indeed any other aspect of what we do – please feel free to drop me a line at rz@king.com I look forward to hearing from you."
So if any of you want to drop King a line, go for it. Call them out on their BS.
The douchebag attorneys at the USPTO need some explanation for this madness. Given that King.com has successfully registered the "Candy" in Europe, doesn't mean it should be overlooked in America too. How can anyone actually trademark such an everyday word??
yeah, tell Apple about it!
King might have thought it was taking Candy from a baby, but now they must prepare to play Legal Saga and Negative PR Saga.
I was thinking "IP Hypocrite Saga"
Lost respect once candy crush trademarked their name, keep the trolling going!
I can't say I sympathize with King.com. I always find it annoying when creative folks use IP laws.
Those IP laws are the same things that underpin the GPL and other Open Source licenses.
Granted, trademarks can sometimes be silly, copyright terms far too long and software patents ridiculous but at heart they do provide some very strong value.
Here and I thought that even in the absence of copyright, GPL and other open source licenses would be covered under contract law.
King not so King anymore.
I wish a large, well-behaved, games company would produce a game (totally original, good, but simple), posing as an independent developer, publish it, wait for King/Zynga to clone it, then sue their asses off. Seems to me like they're only getting away with this because they can bully the small guys.
The problem is that game mechanics aren't really copyrightable. Pac-Avoid was likely removed for its obvious trademark infringement (oh, the irony) but you can get away with some pretty blatant ripping off by changing all the copyrightable assets.
Sounds like the equivalent of a distributed denial of service attack against patent trolling!
It's all fun and games till someone loses a lawsuit.
The Tetris Company LLC has for years claimed copyright and trademark rights over all falling-tetromino games and sending out C&D letters to independent developers. The developers laughed it off, until TTC vs. Xio, in which a district court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff.
By doing something like this the developers are risking serious lawsuits, and the invalidity of the "candy" trademark really can't be established except in a courtroom. And I think most of the smaller devs will settle way before then.
TTC vs Xio involved a direct clone. The judge ruled in his ruling that the game rules and gameplay were not copyrightable. Indeed, the judge noted that games like Dr. Mario (a tetris-like) would not have violated TTC's copyright.
Xio's clone went beyond just rules and gameplay--it copied the dimensions, colors, and various art assets. Comparing screenshots of Tetris and Xio's clone, it would have been very difficult for most people, even those familiar with Tetris, to identify which was the original.
Xio’s game didn’t copy any art assets from anywhere, as I can tell you, since I made all the art for it. [Mostly over one weekend, as a volunteer favor to the developers.]
The colors were not copied from anywhere, they were picked, by me, with no reference to any existing art, using a careful process designed to maximize distinguishability. To be specific, I decided that the colors should all be clearly separated in CIELAB lightness and hue, and then chose which lightness to match to which hue based on the gamut of then-current iPhones.
The result is a bunch of “bright” colors. But lots of games want bright colors, because they are the most easily distinguishable, and having easily distinguishable colors makes a game easier to play.
As for the appearance of the bricks, I cooked up a dozen or so possibilities in Photoshop, and let the rest of the team decide which to use. Again, created in a few various styles, but not with any reference to any previous game.
Just look at the screenshots of Xio's clone and Tetris. They are almost identical. Now compare Tetris with tetris-likes such as Dr. Mario, and the difference is immediately apparent.
Copying assets doesn't just mean verbatim copy-and-paste. It includes recreating other assets such that they are virtually identical to the source material, as the art assets you apparently created were.
IANAL, but these are two different issues. We are discussing a trademark, not a mechanic. TTC never got any of their cases regarding trademark, precisely because no one called it tetris (which is not even a real word). King hasn't copyrighted match-3, and probably won't ever be able to (what with prior art with at least Bejeweled, and I'm sure others before that)
Even aside from all that, I think #candyjam is protected under fair use. The intent is very obviously parody. In fact, it'll probably end up with someone participating in the jam that has a sizable legal team, and they could probably string up a class-action lawsuit for everyone in the jam, which would probably amount to huge settlement costs if King tried to pay their way out of court. Lose-lose situation for them; they shell out massive amounts or lose their trademark for not protecting it.
King is trademarking the words candy and saga so nobody can ripoff king’s ripoffs
I think this is brilliant, but is slamming Apple's iOS approval process with *candy titles really the best way? Isn't there are risk that you are flooding it and causing delays for (sorry for the phrasing) legitimate developers in getting their apps approved?
Hate to cast a negative on this, as it DOES nicely illustrate the ridiculousness of the situation!
I don't think there is any requirement that these games be on iOS.
Thought experiment: What would happen if Apple allowed all these infringing games to stay in the appstore? They'd get a fine? Get sued? What if they then CONTINUED to let the ganes stay. Making a stand on trademarking... I mean, Apple can pay any fine thrown at them and the governemt can't really close them down... Can they? "Yo Cook, shut it down."
How does a state handle companies richer than some countries?