The King.com “Saga” gets funnier and funnier

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 27, 2014

So you know how King.com was claiming that their efforts to trademark (and monopolize) the words “Candy” and “Saga”  for videogames were supposedly to protect themselves from evil cloners just trying to cash in on their IP rights?

Well, they weren’t wrong. There are some unethical, despicable douchebags who will blatantly do that, and worse, daring any other company to call them on it. Like…

Like themselves. King.com is one of the prime offenders.

The story is pretty bad, if you didn’t check out the link. When a potential partner pulled their game to go with another partner, King.com just out-and-out copied their game, only with far more blatantly “borrowed” content from Pac-Man.

Of course, since this announcement came out, and in light of the furor over their “trademark-trolling,” King.com has now removed their cloned game, “Pac-Avoid,” from their virtual arcade, in a lame attempt to either hide the evidence or demonstrate their newfound respect for IP rights. Or both.

And then there’s the whole “The Banner Saga” thing. Remember how their PR claimed that they weren’t trying to prevent The Banner Saga from using the name, and also explaining that no, they aren’t making any claim that Stoic was trying to horn in on their IP or capitalize on their success?

Well, um, about that…

They are lying. Their legal paperwork says otherwise.

Especially when it claims that the title is “deceptively similar” their own.

Like I said last week – these folks (and people like them) are evil. I don’t know another word for it. I know – these days, that’s a word we tend to reserve exclusively for scenery-chewing movie villains, mass murderers, and politicians we disagree with. But if I were to open up the ol’ D&D books and pick an alignment for ’em, it would have to be somewhere in the “evil” third of the chart. They unethically, immorally, and arguably illegally flaunted their ability to get away with abusing others (and their customers, IMO, but that’s just me). Then, once they built up enough of an empire doing so, they turned around and attempted to subvert the law they so often violated (in spirit if not in letter, but certainly outside the bounds of enforcement for those without money) and stomp on the freedom of other game makers. Those with less money but more scruples are the worst hurt.

I am definitely in favor of protecting IP rights (although I do recognize that perhaps the laws in most countries granting those protections are… weird, difficult to enforce, and too often subverted to favor the moneyed). Those who craft with words, images, music, etc. deserve the same kind of protection – and the ability to make a living from their labors – as those who build with metal, wood, plastic, silicon, and so forth. But when copyright is too weak and unenforceable to offer much protection for anybody, and trademark can be applied so broadly by those with deep pockets, I think the existing body of law is failing in the digital age.

Filed Under: Biz, Politics - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



top