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Yeah sorry man, that's clearly IKEA so it's obvious they had to act on it. Can't sell IKEA-branded games without their permission. Even on their Steam trailer,
by boredpudding 20d ago
Yeah sorry man, that's clearly IKEA so it's obvious they had to act on it. Can't sell IKEA-branded games without their permission. Even on their Steam trailer, the first second is clearly IKEA. Just changing the name is not enough. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1593010/The_Store_is_Closed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1593010/The_Store_is_Clos...
Sometimes it's not that deep. Sometimes the cute little indie dev just made a mistake.
The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.
- SXX 20d agoDo you know what parody is?
- david-gpu 20d agoTrademarks are lost when they are not defended. That is entirely separate from fair use in copyright law.
- Y-bar 20d agoThis explains why Apple has sued The Onion a dozen or so times for all the parodies that infringed on trademarks belonging to the corporation. https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no-keybo-1819594761/ https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-lapt... https://theonion.com/new-ipad-offers-3-months-of-something-called-apple-deli/ https://theonion.com/new-ipad-offers-3-months-of-something-c...
- deleted 20d ago[deleted]
- SXX 20d agoJust waiting for The Coca Cola company to sue Bethesda for having Nuka Cola.
- krior 20d agoWhy? There are a lot of colas around the world.
- ZiiS 20d agoWhom they often sue. 100% they would would consider the logo/branding/bottle infringing if they were a competing product.
- mikestew 20d agoSue for using “cola” in the product name? Citation most definitely needed.
- ZiiS 20d agoIs that what I said?
- jasomill 19d agoFallout 4 parodies the potential legal issue itself in one of its loading screens: Nuka-Cola's signature rocket-shaped bottle replaced the traditional curved bottle when a rival corporation successfully sued for patent infringement. Fortunately, the public saw the new bottle as an improvement and Nuka-Cola's sales increased.
- mikestew 20d agoThey’ll probably want to go after Jones Soda first. :eyeroll: https://www.amazon.com/Jones-Soda-Fallout-Nuka-Cola-Flavored/dp/B07HHW8CYJ https://www.amazon.com/Jones-Soda-Fallout-Nuka-Cola-Flavored...
- jchw 20d agoTrademark is about preventing someone's brand for being confused for another. Unless someone was confusing this for being an official IKEA product I'm not sure why it would be in the ballpark of trademark. There is also trade dress of course but that isn't really related.
- Forgeties79 20d agoThis is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.” Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.
- elondaits 20d agoIANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch. That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.
- Mountain_Skies 20d agoA bit of a tangent to Weird Al, who often is said to not need the permission of the original artist because his songs are parodies, usually isn't commenting on the actual content of the original song but instead takes the lyrics and gives them a different theme. 'Smells like Nirvana' is one of the few songs he does that actually does directly parody the original. His videos are far more parody than the songs themselves. Makes me wonder where the legal line actually is drawn and if asking permission is actually because it would be too risky not to.
- bsammon 20d ago(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song. IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.
- xoxxala 20d ago
- wavemode 20d agoNo, tradmarks can be parodied too. It's a first amendment protection, and extremely common in movies, TV and video games. If the developer worked with a lawyer they could've gotten any suit by IKEA (this wasn't a suit yet, just a cease and desist letter) quickly dismissed.
- PeterHolzwarth 20d agoAlways been curious - what are some examples of trademarks being lost due to not being defended?
- wetpaws 20d ago[dead]
- Crunchified 20d agoThere's lots and lots of them. Have you ridden an escalator® lately? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
- setopt 20d agoVery interesting link. I am now confused and intrigued that the trademark for "heroin" is listed as being revoked as part of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
- GabrielTFS 18d agoPart VIII, Annex VI on reparations: Germany was forced to renounce trademark rights on pharmaceutical and chemical products in favor of the Allied powers, so Bayer's Aspirin and Heroin were included.
- jchw 20d agoThough that is not the type of abandonment that IKEA is worried about in this case. In fact it isn't really clear what form of trademark abandonment IKEA would have to be concerned about for this action to be justified. IANAL but IKEA is definitely not worried about the trademark being ruled abandoned due to non-use, procedural issues or naked licensing; they can easily prove the mark(s) are in active use, and the other two are not related to trademark enforcement. Again, IANAL but we do need to stop spreading FUD about what trademarks entail. Trademarks are meant to protect a brand from being diluted or confused, not to police the world of all parody or reference to some thing. In fact, if the store in the game wasn't even called an IKEA, I am really curious what "trademark" they felt it violated, but unfortunately not curious enough to find out. P.S.: a better example of a trademark that fell to non-use would be "Twitter". However I personally dunno if there is a trademark that fell specifically because they didn't bully enough people who tried to use their trademark in ways that wouldn't be confused with their brand. That seems to be a made-up invention by corporate lawyers that people just accept at face value. If it really worked this way, the mark "JavaScript" should've fallen a long time ago.
- srdjanr 20d agoThat's mentioned in the article: > Further, there’s at least the possibility on the part of the developer to claim that such usage is a “parody,” with parody and satire protected at the highest levels of American law through the application of First Amendment freedom of speech rights. However, courts will often require actual commentary to be made in order to extend such protections. In that way, a store name like “I CAN’T A” (or something far more clever) has a greater chance of succeeding than simply using a play on the word “store” in Scandinavian.
- dyzone 20d agoIs IKEA the only furniture store in the world? I do not see any IKEA branding in the trailer.
- bragr 20d agoTrade dress is protected in addition to the actual brand marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
- hagbard_c 20d agoIKEA is the only furniture store with a four-letter name in that same typeface in yellow on a blue building even though it is called 'STYR' here. It is the only furniture store using that uniform, also blue-yellow, for its personnel. The game maker clearly used IKEA as an inspiration but forgot that 'inspiration' is not the same as 'duplication'. They could have made the building red, used a serif typeface and a 7-character name, dressed their 'personnel' in red-green uniforms, etc. and IKEA would not have bothered them. Now, they did, and right they were.
- tomjakubowski 20d agoThe factory builder game Captain of Industry has a building you can add on to a settlement which sells household goods and furniture to the population. It's a blue building with yellow trim and a big sign on the front that says IDEA. I wonder if this is just small potatoes enough of a parody that IKEA wouldn't care about it. https://old.reddit.com/r/captain_of_industry/comments/1vtbz8w/i_just_noticed_this_ikea_building_hilarious/ https://old.reddit.com/r/captain_of_industry/comments/1vtbz8...
- hagbard_c 20d agoThey may just not have noticed it. Are there other brands shown in that way in the same game? That would probably also make it a less of an issue.
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 20d agoNo reasonable person would have been confused into thinking it was an official IKEA game; IANAL, but it seems unlikely to me that IKEA would have ultimately prevailed in court, though a simple change to the color of the logo would probably have been helpful to the devs of the game.
- t2r3121 20d agoIt's a direct ripoff of https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008, a popular sci-fi horror story set in an IKEA. At the time the game was also using IKEA's brand colors.
- crooked-v 20d agoThe game description on Steam even explicitly mentions "SCP Foundation", which the creator also doesn't have the rights to use unless the whole game is Creative Commons-licensed.
- setopt 20d agoIANAL either, but could this be a trademark issue? My understanding is that if you don’t defend your trademarks you risk legally losing them.
- jameshart 20d agoYou can only defend your trademark with respect to product categories that you actually market. Unless IKEA were in the business of selling parody video games, their trademark doesn't apply. Wait... is that why IKEA just put out a parody video game?
- majormajor 20d agoThe game featured a store and stuff in it, that's a product category IKEA markets. If the name of an unrelated game was IKEA as some clever acronym or such and it was unrelated to stores, that would be a different trademark convo.
- sevenseacat 20d agoI dunno, I've read a novel that was set in a store that was very clearly meant to be IKEA (https://www.amazon.com/Horrorstor-Grady-Hendrix/dp/1594745269 https://www.amazon.com/Horrorstor-Grady-Hendrix/dp/159474526...) but was also very clearly not officially IKEA. Where do you draw the line?
- ck2 20d agoI've never been in an IKEA but it looks like Backrooms to me did Backrooms also infringe on IKEA or maybe every furniture store has the same concept
- lovich 20d agoSome of the early backrooms lore and levels were based on noclipping in furniture stores or even IKEA directly since it was all fan made stuff not caring about the legal ramifications. I tried to find a link but it’s impossible now that backrooms is a popular IP And having been in an empty IKEA, it definitely had that liminal feel
- dhosek 20d agoKind of reminds me of a college classmate back in the 80s made a Hypercard game which he had called Escape from Harvey Mudd but which the college asked (maybe demanded?) that it be renamed as it started to get distribution so the more commonly seen version was called Escape from Grid Tech. I would guess that there might have been some reputational concerns as that classmate was one of the people who dropped out of Mudd during my time there (the late 80s cohorts had a lot of people, myself included, who had wavered between humanities and sciences and after exposure to life in the sciences decided to opt for the humanities instead—most of us ended up doing programming for a living having no marketable skills post-college. The one person from my freshman year suite who actually finished his degree at Mudd went on to become a music professor).
- cole-k 20d agoDid not expect to see Mudd mentioned in the comment section on HN for an IKEA Skyrim mod... Not really surprised the admin was like that given the name, but I hope things worked out well for y'all.
- jrflowers 20d ago>The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024. Yeah that’s crazy I wonder why
- Hackbraten 19d ago> The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024. The game is in very active development. The most recent alpha was published just four days ago. [0] [0]: https://steamdb.info/app/1845400/ https://steamdb.info/app/1845400/