WarFoundry and trademarks

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WarFoundry and trademarks

Postby IBBoard at 05 Feb 2010, 20:05

As you may be aware, WarFoundry is one of many applications that has been threatened with legal action by Lone Wolf Development over their Army Builder trademark. A full disclosure, including suggestions of alternate phrases from the community are in another topic, but this sticky post is a general review of the situation and the rules.

Basically, Lone Wolf Development have registered the phrase "Army Builder" as a trademark in the US in relation to software for army roster creation. According to their claims, this means that the term "Army Builder" can only apply to their software and not to as a description of other software such as WarFoundry. Further claims also state:
Rob, President of Lone Wolf Development Inc wrote:...the fact that we have a trademark on the term "Army Builder" means that terms like "army building" and "builder of armies" would be deemed as fundamentally infringing on the trademark.


While I disagree with some of their statements on a fundamental level*, they are the ones with the lawyers and as such I have done what I could to placate the situation and avoid legal action. I also don't trust whether my "common sense" approach would actually match what the courts would decide, as IP law and common sense are not always on the same side.

While this situation was regrettable, potentially unwarranted, potentially a bit late and could have been handled better, we have done what was necessary to keep WarFoundry going and avoid legal action. While we cannot force the community to agree to our decision, we will unfortunately have to enforce the rules on our forums and sites. Please avoid using standard English language as a description of WarFoundry and other applications where it may infringe on the Army Builder trademark.

In summary: Lone Wolf Development trademarked a standard and generic English description as their application name (equivalent to a tower building company called "Tower Builders"), ignored use of that trademark for a number of years, then hit lots of communities with legal threats that claimed ownership of the phrase and other supposedly 'derivative' phrases (equivalent to the aforementioned company claiming infringement for "Joe's Skyscrapers" who describe themselves as "a tower building company"). Rather than risk expensive legal action, we did what was asked to avoid legal action without directly accepting all of their claims. We recommend you do the same to avoid legal threats.


* Including their claims to have co-opted a sub-section of the English language based on the fact that those words and their trademark have a common base (the noun "army" and the verb "to build"), especially when those words are being used in a descriptive manner as is common with the English language. Also, Wikipedia may not be a legal authority, but they linked me to a page about genericisation of trademarks (which suggested a spectrum from "novel and original" to "generic and untrademarkable"). If you read the Wikipedia page on trademarks then it gives the "Whisper Quiet" trademark as an explicit example of where other companies could use it in its descriptive form. This is in direct contradiction to Lone Wolf Development's further claims of trademark coverage.


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Re: WarFoundry and trademarks

Postby IBBoard at 20 Feb 2010, 14:24

The entire story has now been written up, including links to the other sites who were also affected by this.
Out now: Dawn of War Texture/Skin Downloads
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