Legal battle over the 'scrolls' name intensifies
Mojang has been summoned to court to settle a trademark dispute with Bethesda, the Swedish studio’s founder has said.
Markus Persson (pictured) claimed on his personal Twitter account that Bethesda has booked a court date to argue that Mojang must not infringe on the Elder Scrolls trademark.
The publisher, which is also currently suing Interplay, claims it has first right to use the ‘scrolls’ term with entertainment products.
Mojang, the developer of PC sensation Minecraft, is currently building a new project called Scrolls.
Persson, who initially joked that the dispute should be settled over a game of Quake 3, recently assured that “if we are going to court, I will fight this for as long as it takes".
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He alleged that Bethesda’s claim is "bogus".
Further details on the court case are not available at the time of going to press.
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Last week it was revealed that Bethesda had lost a court case against European indie group Masthead. Bethesda wanted the studio to cease work on the Fallout MMO, due to be published by Interplay.
As usual, the big boys are hammering down on independent developers. I don't quite understand how people could mistake Mojang's game "Scrolls" for an Elder Scrolls game, they are quite obviously different franchises from two very different developers / publishers.
isn't that kind of like the creators of Dragon Quest going after EA/Bioware for using the word Dragon in the Dragon Age series?
What's funny about this is that when the "Elder Scroll" games are commonly referred too, rarely do I hear people actually call them the "Elder Scrolls" series. More commonly, they refer them to their subtitle, like "Oblivion" and "Skyrim". It just shows that the trademark they are fighting over is not exactly the strongest marketing tool out there, and I highly doubt people will become confused between the two.
Being a minecraft fan writing that was hard, but from what I've been reading Bethesda is suing not because he made a game with the word "Scrolls" but because he tried to patent the word scrolls... which would mean that Bethesda would need to change the name of their games.
Frankly, I doubt they'll want to do that at this point. Oddly enough, mojang's patent on scrolls sounds like it also covers multiple other items such as shirts (there's already a company that has this patent). So they should really say: "Sorry, we're going to stop trying to get a patent on the name now."
