Marvel sues CoH

[bloke]

Marvel sues two companies over role-playing game

Quote:

The lawsuit claims South Korea-based NCSoft and San Jose-based Cryptic Studios violated Marvel's trademark characters in their game City of Heroes. Marvel seeks unspecified damages and an injunction against the two companies to stop using its characters.

in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, Marvel argues that the game's character creation engine easily allows players to design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including "The Incredible Hulk."

The company singles out a game feature for creating "a gigantic, green, 'science-based tanker'-type hero that moves and behaves nearly identically" to the "Hulk." Players can also create a "mutant-based" hero powers and a costume nearly identical to Marvel's "Wolverine."

I guess Marvel plans to sue every other comic book and video game publisher too, since they own the patent on superheroes.

I haven't played CoH, but I used to be a big comic fan and this is just a dumb move by Marvel.

[shlo_mo_shun]

I wondered when this would happen. Seriously, CoH hasn't done a good job of cracking down on the name infringements and such, at all. People on the CoH boards have been talking about this for a long time.....I am just surpriesed it took this long. All they would have had to do is block out a couple of character build combinations (or at least have a notification sent to GM's if a certain combination was utilized, who could then check it out and ban that character) to protect themselves from this, including Hulk, Wolverine, and a few of the other biggies, and viola, they would have been in the clear.

[Kierrato]

Oh well, I guess its legit from Marvel's side , but agree with Bloke, it wasnt nescessary

Marvel has alot of money, I doubt they need to sue

But on the other hand, Im an artist myself and I can only imagine how much it would suck to be copied to the dot so badly and make profit off of one of my models and claiming its theirs just because they tilted its nose or made a reproduction with a different pair of boots

Then again , when you are this big its pretty much just publicity ... as everyone knows those famous figures anyway...

[shlo_mo_shun]

What I am reading is that it WAS necessary. Thye aren't suing over a copyright violation, but a Trademark one. There is a difference I guess. The deal is this.
If you knowingly allow others to use your trademarked stuff for a period of time, then eventually your trademark becomes NULL or somesuch. If that is actually the case, then they HAVE to sue, or risk losing the future ability to use their characters exclusively.

[Raigen]

Doing the most imporatant things in life:

Sleeping
Working
Eating
Playing City of Heroes

I've noticed that there has been quite the uprising of "GenericHero####" people showing up where "ShesHulks" and "Flash Marvels" used to be.
And, personally, I think it's quite refreshing. Don't get me wrong, though, growing up doing nothing more than reading comic books and drawing the characters therein I thought it might be cool to live in a city where those heroes lived. But Paragon is not that city. And this has been a long time coming.

Long live imagination!
(If that still exists..)