[zamalek]

Firstly, non-enforcement of trademarks results in losing said trademarks. I've been downvoted more than once around here for saying that, so here's a citation[1]:

> Trademark rights may also be lost when a trademark owner fails effectively to police its mark against eroded distinctiveness, which may occur as a result of the presence of confusingly similar third-party marks in the market.

Secondly, why pay for Starcraft when I can just play Starcraft-JS for free? Although I'm completely on-board with Startcraft-JS, I strongly doubt that Blizzard will react well to it.

[1]: http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/LossofT...

[Sir_Substance]

>Secondly, why pay for Starcraft when I can just play Starcraft-JS for free?

In the world I would like to live in, Blizzard game devs would see this as a challenge and aspire to make games of sufficient quality that they fairly out-compete a scrappy open source js pretender.

The state of the gaming industry being what it is these days though, theres a solid chance of this project producing an objectivly better game than Blizzard is currently capable of making.

[nkrisc]

In your world consumers would be unable to tell the difference between the crappy clones and the original and probably give up on all of them.

Blizzard is, rightfully, concerned about consumers being confused and thinking that they are somehow involved in this endeavor.

Lastly, if their scrappy open source game is better than Blizzard's, they shouldn't need Blizzard's assets. Unless of course, it was the Starcraft identity that made it "good" in the first place.

[mikeash]

In the world I would like to live in, customers who want to play Starcraft wouldn't have to do a bunch of research to figure out which one is Blizzard's and which one is the pretender.

[Razengan]

In the world you would like to live in, every product would have over a hundred Chinese knockoffs with the same name, luring patrons away from each other with advertisements featuring big-busted ladies or cute fluffy cartoons, and no one would have any incentive to put effort into making games of sufficient quality that aren't a free-to-play front for milking in-app purchases.

For a preview of such a world, see the App Store and Google Play.

[Sir_Substance]

>For a preview of such a world, see the App Store and Google Play.

Yeah, because no one could call that a success. There is definitely widespread agreement among the populous that such things are far too difficult to deal with and that life was better before.

/s

[Razengan]

Tell me, why make a Grim Fandango or The Room when you can make far more money for far less effort with a Verby Noun or Clash of Things?

Apparently any quality is sufficient to be a success.

[Sir_Substance]

That's not the influence of the app store, it's the influence of an influx of marketing staff and investment capital.

Games went from being a niche thing that only people who cared got involved in to a big business, and in the process the priority shifted from "make good games" to "use dodgy tricks and known mental blind spots to manipulate people into paying the maximum possible amount for a product".

The people who actually care about games are being squeezed into indie studios or right out of the business, because they keep saying inconvenient things like "the skins model compromises my vision for the game, I refuse to do it".

To be brutally honest, as a life long gamer I see more merit in starcraft-js than I do in the starcraft II series.

[gpm]

> Firstly, non-enforcement of trademarks results in losing said trademarks.

The Starcraft-JS people might be able to argue it's a purely descriptive use, definitely if they change the name to ThirdParty-Starcraft-Clone-In-Js or something like that.

[rsynnott]

> Secondly, why pay for Starcraft when I can just play Starcraft-JS for free?

It's a clone of the original Starcraft, which came out 18 years ago. I doubt Blizzard sells that many copies today...

[tinco]

You'll be surprised to learn that StarCraft is played by thousands of players still and Blizzard probably still makes good money selling Starcraft licenses. As StarCraft 2's popularity is diminishing, it looks like at some point SC:BW will again be more popular than SC2.

StarCraft is not like your average abandonware game.

[oconnor0]

StarCraft 2's popularity is diminishing?

[lunchTime42]

Carrier of News has arrived.

[artmageddon]

This is news to me as well..

[gloomyson]

I'll already deleted all audios and images belong to Blizzard, now this game is not playable without these materials, I'just want to show those js codes

[Nullabillity]

> Secondly, why pay for Starcraft when I can just play Starcraft-JS for free?

Well, presumably (some of) that money goes somewhere else than Kotick's pockets. If they can't compete properly then isn't that the market working as intended?

[alienasa]

That's not how that works. You're welcome to compete by making a different RTS game, but you can't just copy theirs and offer it up for free and then say they should "outcompete" you.

[zamalek]

It doesn't matter how the market should behave (I agree with you about free competition), the reality is that Blizzard owns the trademark and there are legal processes surrounding that.

They can compete, just not with the same trademarked name or, as previously, copyrighted materials. I'm not referring to how things should work, rather how they actually work.

[scotty79]

First, is there a single event in history where multimillion dollar trademark lost the protection that was paid for because there existed open-source hobby project with the same name?

Secondly, are you seriously comparing a game that had 10 installments or so and sold in millions of copies with somebody's fan hobby project?

Could reasonable person confuse the two? Could reasonable person claim that one is substitute for the other?

Also "bottom line" suggests that Blizzard could be harmed financially which is preposterous.

[dragonwriter]

> First, is there a single event in history where multimillion dollar trademark lost the protection that was paid for because there existed open-source hobby project with the same name?

No, because loss of trademarks from non-enforcement was well-established risk before "open source software" was a thing, so no trademark owner that cares fails to police against open source hobby projects with the same name in the same market.

[zamalek]

Some valid points, however:

> Could reasonable person confuse the two? Could reasonable person claim that one is substitute for the other?

If not a "No True Scotsman" argument, that's a personal attack. I am a reasonable pragmatist that is very-much in touch with reality and reality often sucks. If I'm proven wrong; I would be overjoyed. I just really can't see any benefit for an open source project (with no legal resources) taking a risk like this.

Posting to HN and Reddit with "HTML5 Starcraft" in the title is one thing (and conveys the same message), actually including Starcraft in the project name is a completely unnecessary risk. There is evidence to support that statement: Nostalrius and WOW emulation in general. Blizzard went after multiple WOW emulation projects (e.g. MongOS and WGrid) even though they claimed to be "an educational project for MMO servers." MongOS did nothing more than provide a black-box-replicated data set for the WOW client and protocol-level compatibility with WOW (also black-box-replicated): there was no copyright or trademark infringement and they still found themselves in trouble.

Open source has poked this legal wasp nest multiple times and has been stung by that every time. Is there any evidence in support of Blizzard just standing by and letting things slide?

[scotty79]

>> reasonable person

> that's a personal attack.

How's that a personal attack?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

[zamalek]

> How's that a personal attack?

Context:

> Secondly, are you seriously comparing a game that had 10 installments or so and sold in millions of copies with somebody's fan hobby project?

> Could reasonable person confuse the two? Could reasonable person claim that one is substitute for the other?

Emphasis mine. This discussion is now devolving into adhod and moving targets. All I did was present facts and evidence. I'm very much done here.

[scotty79]

When writing reasonable person, I mean legal term that I linked. I'm aware that corporate lawyers are writing strongly worded letters to common folk. I'd just want to see them convince the court that reasonable person would think common people efforts affect them in any way.