Version 0.16.51

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5thHorseman
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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by 5thHorseman »

Ghoulish wrote:I'm not familiar with law in any way, yet this seems bizarre, it's akin to someone saying you no longer own your home because you haven't lived there for a few months/years. At least it seems that way to me.
You may not be familiar with another law then.

http://www.beliveaulaw.net/2011/04/some ... ng-enough/

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by zOldBulldog »

Frankly, the new battery looks more like a water heater.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Omnifarious »

Ghoulish wrote: I'm not familiar with law in any way, yet this seems bizarre, it's akin to someone saying you no longer own your home because you haven't lived there for a few months/years. At least it seems that way to me.
Conflating the limited rights granted by governments to control how various kinds of ideas are distributed with physical property rights is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons, this being just one small example. Ideas are not at all like physical property and sincerely hope they never will be treated as if they are. That way lies corporate totalitarianism and a shuttering of creative enterprises of all kinds.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Sander_Bouwhuis »

Grrrrrrr, hate the new look. I guess I'll have to install a mod now to get batteries to look normal again?
NOT a good change! :cry:

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by posila »

So, Duracell very politely pointed out to us by an e-mail the battery design we were using is their trademark and asked us to change it. We wanted to make 0.16.50 stable, and we were happy Duracell reached out to us informally first, so we pushed out .51 to resolve this issue promptly. Unfortunatelly, we don't have in place mechanisms that would allow us to update single file without bumping version number.

Companies need to protect their trademarks otherwise the'll lose them. Factorio doesn't have that large audience on the global scale on its own, but if Duracell let this one go and maybe 100 other cases of the similar scope with it, enough people might shift their perception of copper-black battery design from something specific to Duracell brand to "that's just how AA batteries look like"; then if somebody challenged Duracell's trademark, court might decide it has been genericized, Duracell would lose it and they would have to invest lot of money to build up new brand. This quite often happens to name of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... trademarks

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Zavian »

Ok thanks for confirming what a few people had been speculating. Looking at the new battery design you simply reused the battery research icon (which would have been simple and easy. Perfectly reasonable for an impromptu and unplanned change). Are you planning to provide a new (better looking) icon for 0.17?

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Gergely »

posila wrote:So, Duracell very politely pointed out to us by an e-mail the battery design we were using is their trademark and asked us to change it.

Companies need to protect their trademarks otherwise the'll lose them. Factorio doesn't have that large audience on the global scale on its own, but if Duracell let this one go and maybe 100 other cases of the similar scope with it, enough people might shift their perception of copper-black battery design from something specific to Duracell brand to "that's just how AA batteries look like"; then if somebody challenged Duracell's trademark, court might decide it has been genericized, Duracell would lose it and they would have to invest lot of money to build up new brand. This quite often happens to name of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... trademarks
This just stopped making sense to me.

I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell. You got me there, I am one of those people. I recently got to play another game which just so happens to do the same thing. Take a look:
Source: cm2
Source: cm2
Copper-Black.png (1.24 MiB) Viewed 7795 times
The change is negative, and far too big for a too small reason.

By the way, content placement is basically the only type of advertising I saw in like... months!
Last edited by Gergely on Mon Jun 25, 2018 1:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by ratchetfreak »

Gergely wrote:
posila wrote:So, Duracell very politely pointed out to us by an e-mail the battery design we were using is their trademark and asked us to change it.

Companies need to protect their trademarks otherwise the'll lose them. Factorio doesn't have that large audience on the global scale on its own, but if Duracell let this one go and maybe 100 other cases of the similar scope with it, enough people might shift their perception of copper-black battery design from something specific to Duracell brand to "that's just how AA batteries look like"; then if somebody challenged Duracell's trademark, court might decide it has been genericized, Duracell would lose it and they would have to invest lot of money to build up new brand. This quite often happens to name of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... trademarks
This just stopped making sense to me.

I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell. You got me there, I am one of those people. I recently got to play another game which just so happens to do the same thing. Take a look:
Copper-Black.png
The change is negative, and far too big for a too small reason.

By the way, I content placement is basically the only type of advertising I saw in like... months!
That just means that Duracell's lawyers haven't seen that game yet.

Losing the trademark also means that other battery companies can make Black+Copper batteries without danger of getting sued. Those batteries would likely be cheaper and inferior and Duracell would get blamed for that. That would lose them a lot of business in the long run.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Sander_Bouwhuis »

posila wrote:So, Duracell very politely pointed out to us by an e-mail the battery design we were using is their trademark and asked us to change it.
Ok, I stand corrected. It's a shame we need a mod now to have a clear looking battery (unless you can improve on the gfx).

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by 5thHorseman »

Gergely wrote:I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell.
...which is a huge problem to a company that probably spent millions of dollars designing a theme and is worried that some knock-off battery maker will take it, confusing the public and cutting into their revenue. That's exactly what trademark protections are for.

The difference between that and "Google" being a verb for "search" is that Google should be happy that people say "I googled that on Bing" but Microsoft should hate it.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Sander_Bouwhuis »

5thHorseman wrote:The difference between that and "Google" being a verb for "search" is that Google should be happy that people say "I googled that on Bing" but Microsoft should hate it.
That is CERTAINLY not true! If someone says 'I googled that on Bing' and does a search on Bing then Google gets 0 revenue. Microsoft would LOVE people to 'google on Bing'.

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by 5thHorseman »

Sander_Bouwhuis wrote:
5thHorseman wrote:The difference between that and "Google" being a verb for "search" is that Google should be happy that people say "I googled that on Bing" but Microsoft should hate it.
That is CERTAINLY not true! If someone says 'I googled that on Bing' and does a search on Bing then Google gets 0 revenue. Microsoft would LOVE people to 'google on Bing'.
We're talking about slightly different things. Microsoft would of course prefer people to use their search engine. But they do NOT want those people to refer to the activity as "googling."

Preference spectrum:
MICROSOFT GOD ZONE
"I binged that on Bing!"
"I searched for that on Bing!"
"I googled that on Bing!"
"I searched for that on the Internet!"
"I binged that on Google!"
"I searched for that on Google!"
"I googled that on Google!"
GOOGLE'S GOD ZONE

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bobingabout
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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by bobingabout »

Maybe change it to something else.

Since I already change the colour of the old battery so many people love in my bobplates mod to make the silver oxide, and lithium ion batteries, I'm thinking I'll re-colour the original yet again (to remove the copper top) and release it as an override colour.

Alternatively I might dive back into 0.9 and re-use the old battery from there.

Either way, Yellow, Red, Blue it is! (Belt colours for 3 tiers) or maybe Red, Blue, Purple, because the MK1 battery is already a Tier 2/3 item.
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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Aeternus »

Why not change the icon to that of a car battery? A cube-y shape fits the industrial motif better anyway, does it not?

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Gergely
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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Gergely »

5thHorseman wrote:
Gergely wrote:I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell.
...which is a huge problem to a company that probably spent millions of dollars designing a theme and is worried that some knock-off battery maker will take it, confusing the public and cutting into their revenue. That's exactly what trademark protections are for.
Yeah... though that still fails to convince me that this is their "property".

I don't understand how Factorio's (past) and cm2's usage of the same design would help anyone to produce similar looking real-life battery and actually get away with it.
I mean, batteries in the games are virtual right?!

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by posila »

Gergely wrote:Yeah... though that still fails to convince me that this is their "property".
They registered the design as their trademark so they own it - the registration office didn't find any conflict and nobody opposed it (as opposed to, for example, people opposing The Fine Brothers application for "REACT" trademark or Bethesda vs. Mojang "Scrolls" trademark dispute).
Gergely wrote:I don't understand how Factorio's (past) and cm2's usage of the same design would help anyone to produce similar looking real-life battery and actually get away with it.
I mean, batteries in the games are virtual right?!
If someone went to court and challenged Duracell's trademark, court would conduct some kind of public survey to find out if people perceive the design as "a generic battery" or "battery of some specific brand" (I don't know how this survey is conducted, and it probably is complicated and takes long time to do). Then the court decides if the design has "genericized" or is still protected trademark owned by the company. If use of the design in games causes shift in perception of this battery design from "Duracell battery" to "a battery" (which happened to you or even me), Duracell will be in danger of losing their trademark, in which case anyone would be able to start using the desing for their batteries.

If you are interested in the topic, you can watch some videos from Leonard French - for example Google Trademark Genericide Challenged, DENIED

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by BlueTemplar »

This paper also seems relevant ?
Intellectual Property or Intellectual Monopoly? - Peter Boettke
(Peter Boettke is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University; the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, Vice President for Research, and Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at GMU.)

Summary :
The idea that intellectual property rights are a form of state-granted and enforced
monopoly goes back to the beginning of theorizing about intellectual property,
and is still influential in intellectual property theory and policy today. In this
paper I argue that intellectual property is not essentially a form of monopoly.
Equating intellectual property with monopoly results from a failure to recognize
two important disanalogies between intellectual property rights and property
rights in land and material objects. Intellectual property rights may give their
holders monopolistic powers, depending on how they are (mis)interpreted and
enforced, but there is a feasible conception of intellectual property that is not
monopolistic. Thus, arguments that intellectual property is not justifiable,
because of the drawbacks of monopolies, are reasons to explore intellectual
property reform, but not reasons to abolish intellectual property institutions.
BobDiggity (mod-scenario-pack)

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Loewchen »

posila wrote:So, Duracell very politely pointed out to us by an e-mail the battery design we were using is their trademark and asked us to change it. We wanted to make 0.16.50 stable, and we were happy Duracell reached out to us informally first, so we pushed out .51 to resolve this issue promptly. Unfortunatelly, we don't have in place mechanisms that would allow us to update single file without bumping version number.

Companies need to protect their trademarks otherwise the'll lose them. Factorio doesn't have that large audience on the global scale on its own, but if Duracell let this one go and maybe 100 other cases of the similar scope with it, enough people might shift their perception of copper-black battery design from something specific to Duracell brand to "that's just how AA batteries look like"; then if somebody challenged Duracell's trademark, court might decide it has been genericized, Duracell would lose it and they would have to invest lot of money to build up new brand. This quite often happens to name of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... trademarks
The fact that Duracell has an interest to prevent trademark dilution does not get them legally anywhere though. You do not compete in the same market, you do not mislead others into believing you are affiliated with Duracell. You produce a product of art and are exercising your right to nominatively use another companies trademark in a minimalistic way the same way a movie shows a BMW on the street or the protagonist to drink Coka Cola.
They did not send you an email instead of suing because they are nice, the did it because you were not infringing their mark and they know it (all imo).

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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Trblz »

Loewchen wrote:
posila wrote:....
The fact that Duracell has an interest to prevent trademark dilution does not get them legally anywhere though. You do not compete in the same market, you do not mislead others into believing you are affiliated with Duracell. You produce a product of art and are exercising your right to nominatively use another companies trademark in a minimalistic way the same way a movie shows a BMW on the street or the protagonist to drink Coka Cola.
They did not send you an email instead of suing because they are nice, the did it because you were not infringing their mark and they know it (all imo).
Right, as you (Factorio) are not competing in the battery market, or advertising in such way that it might cause confusion with customers, you are not infringing in the Duracell TM. Neither is Factorio using the battery icon or the iconic energizer bunny in any way in advertisement or commercial products. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_infringement for more detials.

Having said this, it is probably not worth the time and headache for Factorio team to even consider fighting this request. It easily becomes a David vs Golliath fight, tough it will not be the first one: Here are an example of similar attempts of bigger companies trying to do the same: Apple vs Apfelkind (a German cafe): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/ ... le-germany
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Re: Version 0.16.51

Post by Liono2010 »

When this version is going to be marked stable on steam? On steam the stable version is still 0.16.36.

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