New description needed for WarFoundry

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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby Squig at 06 Feb 2010, 16:33

What a bunch of complete (explicated deleted)... thus proving that the law (at least in the US) is more interested in earning it's keep than actually helping people... this is really sickening. Glad you got it resolved.

Well I for one was considering a purchase of Lone Wolf's application, but now? Not a chance... Incidentally I'm thinking of trademarking the word "Army" wonder how that would fly :twisted: :lol: :lol: :lol:

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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby IBBoard at 07 Feb 2010, 19:40

Much like consultants then, really. There's no point in a consultant saying the job is done, as it ends their income! Most law is sensible enough, but law relating to "IPR" (technically Intellectual Property Rights, but I've seen it called Invisible Property) does seem particularly stupid and favourable to the owner rather than sensible and reasonable use.

I've not heard anything back from Rob, and my 24 hours deadline has passed, so I'm assuming that they can't find anything legally wrong with our content now. There might still be things they don't like (perhaps the way I'm not so flattering about the description of the situation, which doesn't exactly have the same tone as the message that they suggested I post!) but seemingly nothing that they can legally challenge me on.

In related news, I'm still waiting for a response via the EFF. Hopefully I'll get something concrete soon and be able to ask Lone Wolf Dev and their lawyers for comment (if it says some of the things I'd hope it says).

Also, good to hear that you're not going to give them any money because if this. If we can get more visibility of that aspect of the situation then maybe they'll realise what a bad move it is.
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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby snowblizz at 07 Feb 2010, 21:37

IBBoard wrote:Also, good to hear that you're not going to give them any money because if this. If we can get more visibility of that aspect of the situation then maybe they'll realise what a bad move it is.

I wouldn't count on it. No company is going to analyse how lenient they can be when there's even a slight possibility that their TMs will be dented.

I think the best we can hope for is that they are polite. If they'd maybe consider to curb their most stupid claims and conceding that "constructing armed forces" (read: The Forbidden Words) is a general expression and not their property, that'd be a huge win.

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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby IBBoard at 08 Feb 2010, 13:19

Yeah, perhaps. Maybe my wording was a little optimistic there - I was thinking more of a general "ooops, maybe we could have approached that better" rather than a full "we shouldn't have done that at all".

From what I understand, though, they don't have to threaten legal action at all, just be seen to be trying to enforce their trademark. I guess there is always the possibility that the judge throws it out later saying "you call that 'attempting to protect your trademark'?", but apparently Xerox just go for adverts showing the proper use.
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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby IBBoard at 09 Feb 2010, 20:55

Since the last response was a bit open-ended, I just sent the following email. If I don't hear anything back then we have confirmation that we're in the clear with what we have up to now :)

Rob,

It has been approaching 100 hours since your last email and I have not received any update. While this should mean that all is okay, I'd like to be sure of the situation.

In accordance with your last email, if I do not receive any details of specific pages that contain text that you believe still infringes on your trademark (or any of the associated phrases that you also make claims on) then I will assume that both yourself and your lawyers are happy with all of the content that is currently on my website (as of the time of my last email - 20:30pm GMT, 5th Feb 2010).

As before, I remain happy to discuss the situation to come to an amicable arrangement and await your notification on specific areas that you feel may not be acceptable.

Regards,

Stuart
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Re: New description needed for WarFoundry

Postby IBBoard at 18 Feb 2010, 20:38

Still nothing back from them. I gave them two chances to find any problems after I made my final changes and they've not complained, so we can now take that as us being in the clear with everything we'd done to that date.

The ironic thing after all of this is that Rob's comment about how we "will see a profound decrease in your Google search results over the next week or two" has kinda backfired. Despite the fact that we now only use Army Builder to reference their application and never as the descriptive noun and verb for an application to create army rosters, we've now moved up from between 8th and 10th to 6th when I search "army builder" :D All perfectly above board, but definitely showing that you can't shoot down the competition that easily on Google :)

[edit] Also, it appears that Rob has openly admitted that there is a difference between infringing ("Fred's Army Builder", for example) and improper use (such as a user asking for "an army builder tool"). The former they have to threaten over, the latter they just have to try to educate. That's not to say that I advocate improper use (given the threats of legal action, I'll probably have to keep this site clean anyway) but it does appear it isn't actionable in and of itself.
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