You may not be familiar with another law then.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.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.
This just stopped making sense to me.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
That just means that Duracell's lawyers haven't seen that game yet.Gergely wrote:This just stopped making sense to me.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
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: 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!
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).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.
...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.Gergely wrote:I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell.
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'.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.
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."Sander_Bouwhuis wrote: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'.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.
Yeah... though that still fails to convince me that this is their "property".5thHorseman wrote:...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.Gergely wrote:I never thought of the copper-black battery design as something specific and unique to Duracell.
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:Yeah... though that still fails to convince me that this is their "property".
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.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?!
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.
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.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
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.Loewchen 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.posila wrote:....
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).
