[mquander]

It's entirely reasonable to think that the average consumer would be confused at the titles.

Serious question: Is "reasonable" being used as some legal term of art here? Because I think it's a totally ridiculous idea that the average consumer would be "confused" because one game is named, e.g. "The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind" and another is named "Scrolls." That doesn't even pass the laugh test.

[darklajid]

That's probably the target audience that buys a second copy "The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind" instead of "The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim", because - they got confused.

I agree: I fail to see how these can be easily confused.

[cowboyhero]

Bethesda has multiple trademarks for the franchise. Each individual installment is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" and the entire franchise is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls."

If you (in the collective sense, not you personally) know who Bethesda is and what games they've made in the past and know who Notch is, you're not the average consumer in this context.

I think there's a definite reason to think confusion could come into play when these titles are next to each other on the shelf, or show up in search results with little to no context, or are featured in Amazon's contextual results or on services like XBox Live or Steam.

Parents don't know Notch or gaming history. They know that little Timmy asked for a fantasy game with the word "scrolls" in the title. This situation, which I imagine would be pretty common at Christmas time, is part of why Bethesda is taking action.

The other part -- and this is the much more important part -- is that Bethesda has no choice. If they fail to take action and do their due diligence, and a competitor can later prove it (by citing this example with Notch) then they risk losing the mark entirely.

Which means then EA could conceivably come out with a game called "The Younger Scrolls: Obsession" and Bethesda would have no recourse.

[pbhjpbhj]

>If they fail to take action and do their due diligence, and a competitor can later prove it (by citing this example with Notch) then they risk losing the mark entirely.

// They would lose the rights to a trademark "scrolls" but they don't have that mark anyway.

You don't have to protect against people using similar marks unless they clearly are confusingly similar.

[shabble]

My understanding is that the protection aspect only requires the trademark holder to prevent unauthorised use. There's nothing stopping them from accepting his terms (Only used within a specific phrase, etc) and granting him a licence to use it for a nominal fee.

That can all be done with a minimum of lawyering, and without getting courts involved at all.

[jarin]

Which is also somewhat silly because most of the Elder Scrolls games are commonly known by their subtitles (e.g. Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc.)