Marvel sues City of Heroes

[Traska]

"The little guy"??

NCSoft has the Lineage series, which has *millions* of subscribers paying their monthly fee. They are *so* not the little guy.

[Traska]

Last night, I saw (on VIRTUE, the freaking RP server, people):

Mr Incredible
Elastigirl
Violet
'Dash (Because, you see, the little freak's name had already been taken... next week, we'll see a D-aa~`s'.'h)

All of them level five (which is five levels too many, methinks).

I hope this doesn't spell doom for CoH, but if it does, it won't be Marvel's doing.

[Traska]

Here's the thing. The player can't sue Marvel. See, when you log into CoH, you agree to the EULA which states that everything on their servers belongs to them, period.

Which means, of course, that they're charging you money to access copies of Marvel's intellectual property that they own.

That's what they've got to seriously worry about.

[Overlord Rikonius]

Hmm... it probably is prohibitive to have GMs patrol and catch them all. And do the players really want to snitch?

So... idea: have a bounty system. Maybe every snitching that leads to a TOS ban gets a player a few XPs, or a day of free play time. Institute a system where you can "snap a picture" and autosend it to admin (picture would actually be the current character data model info), along with the sender's account info so he can get his reward. I bet they'd have almost all of the clones snitched out then. Hell, players would go clone hunting. "Look, it's Wulvereene! It's comin' right for us!"

[Overlord Rikonius]

Hmm... it probably is prohibitive to have GMs patrol and catch them all. And do the players really want to snitch?

So... idea: have a bounty system. Maybe every snitching that leads to a TOS ban gets a player a few XPs, or a day of free play time. Institute a system where you can "snap a picture" and autosend it to admin (picture would actually be the current character data model info), along with the sender's account info so he can get his reward. I bet they'd have almost all of the clones snitched out then. Hell, players would go clone hunting. "Look, it's Wulvereene! It's comin' right for us!"

I don't really need a reward.... I only do it when I'm grumpy, so someone else's misery is it's own reward.

If you send the character's name to support, they've pretty much got a snapshot. I'm willing to bet that most players have never even encountered a GM, but with a couple days of dedicated effort, I think it'd be pretty easy to drastically reduce the active players violating the ToS.

well, yeah, but with My plan, they can save lots of effort as many people are more mercenary than you. And as the clones become rarer, they can up the prizes a little. Instead of them setting up a mass dragnet and pulling their GMs off of what they're doing, let the greed of the public work for them...

[MrTwist]

I can't wait for Marvel to start suing World of Warcraft because someone named a green ork character the Hulck!

May marvels lawyers rot in a dirty dark hole.

So it's a bad thing they want to protect their company's IP?

[MrTwist]

The problem is where does it stop? If they win this lawsuit they can just move on to the next and the next until the only online characters are Marvels characters.

Since COH is such a small company when compared to Marvel they are just being bullied by the larger conglamerate. If COH was a DC company and there were similar characters to MArvel they wouldnt say anything because it might take years and years to get anywhere or they might even lose.

Huh? CoH is not a company. It is a game. One of those behind CoH, Wizkids, has had previous dealings with Marvel with their Heroclix system.

Beyond that. DC should never be used in a discussion about being a bully. Don't forget that Captain Marvel was not a DC character at start. They sued the small company who came up with the concept of Captain Marvel because he too closely resembled Superman. Now, Captain Marvel is owned by DC.

[PigLickJF]

Huh? CoH is not a company. It is a game. One of those behind CoH, Wizkids, has had previous dealings with Marvel with their Heroclix system.

Wizkids isn't behind CoH at all either. Cryptic and NCSoft are the ones behind CoH, and the ones who this suit are leveled against. And while Cryptic is indeed small, NCSoft is most definitely not. I don't know the exact numbers, but I really wouldn't even be all that surprised if NCSoft actually has deeper pockets than Marvel itself, in fact.

PigLick

[MrTwist]

Huh? CoH is not a company. It is a game. One of those behind CoH, Wizkids, has had previous dealings with Marvel with their Heroclix system.

Wizkids isn't behind CoH at all either. Cryptic and NCSoft are the ones behind CoH, and the ones who this suit are leveled against. And while Cryptic is indeed small, NCSoft is most definitely not. I don't know the exact numbers, but I really wouldn't even be all that surprised if NCSoft actually has deeper pockets than Marvel itself, in fact.

PigLick

I didn't mean to say behind CoH, I meant to say currently working with. That's what I get for posting while drunk.

[Traska]

/emote Resuscitates the thread
/emote waits for thread's Endurance to regenerate

Ahem.

Okay, anyway... in CoH tonight (dinged 14 with my new soloing blaster), and I see a hero named.... Marvel Girl. Redhead, wearing a gold and red costume with a gold sash and a gold bird on the chest. So far, pretty damned easy right? Two things stuck out as I petitioned away. First... 15th level. Second, she was in the supergroup... (wait for it..): X Men. That's right. So, it's pretty clear that Cryptic is doing next to nothing about the problem, if they managed to get a whole group of them together. Or at the very least, they're not being the least bit proactive about it, choosing instead to wait for reports to roll in.

Which is a bad idea in this case, by the way. It's entirely possible that they could be more or less guilty by neglect. (Example: You have a young child staying in your home. Said child finds your gun and shoots themself with it. Now, you may not have pulled the trigger, but by your inaction, you allowed the act to take place).

Seems to me Cryptic thinks that they're not guilty of anything. If that were true, Marvel wouldn't even be trying this. This isn't a case of Paramount going after a Kirk/Picard slash fiction site... this is a company going after a company. One that's sure to have lawyers. You don't sic a pit bull on another pit bull unless you're ready for vet bills, savvy?

[Sentinel]

For grins and giggles, I went back to my comics encyclopedias to look at the first major lawsuit involving copyright infrigements: DC Vs. Fawcett Publications, more commonly known as Superman Vs. Captain Marvel. It's fairly interesting reading (almost as much as "Seduction Of The Innocent", but that's another topic...) and it's apparently still relevant today. Funny, in the outcome, Fawcett won the first round, there was an appeal, DC won the second round, but Fawcett went out of business anyway, and DC bought all their characters, and published them systematically through the coming years.
I seem to recall some legal clause about needing to be more than 10% different form the original in order to not be an infringment, but I could be mistaken about that (it has been quite some time since I have cared about these things). I believe this how Marvel can have a Captain Marvel without incurring a similar suit. It also explains why Marvel and DC try to keep their characters (sometimes even the lame one) 'alive', so they can maintain thier copyright and registered trademarks. Any one remember Marvels' cease-and -desist on Tim Vigil for his comic "Omega"?
Personally, I cna't see the appeal of ripping off a character created by someone else, when I have a perfectly good imagination and could create my own characters, but that's just me.

[Traska]

Update: She's still on the Liberty server.

As is IronMan-X, the red-and-gold-armored hero... you know, the one with the chest jewel that looks like a yellow lens inside a red ring ont eh chest?

I reported *that* guy on Monday. If they're not eliminating clones in four days, I think Marvel *does* have a point.