[wtallis]

His handling of the Bethesda case is only bad if this really isn't a case of an overly-zealous legal department operating on autopilot. So far, there's no reason to suspect that:

All the information that's public indicates that Bethesda's claims are weak or entirely baseless, and they are not interested in reaching a compromise or really any two-way communication prior to going to court.

Any lawyer that starts a tenuous but high-profile suit without considering the PR aspects is simply crazy, but that seems to be what's happening. Notch has been trying to get someone at Bethesda with a human perspective to intervene, but so far, hasn't been successful.

[bena]

Bethesda is acting rationally and logically. Trademark is easily lost and Bethesda needs to be on top of any potentially infringing marks.

Notch is handling this in the worst way possible. The first thing he should have done is go to his lawyers, have them set up a meeting with Bethesda and their lawyers, then hash out everything quietly. No, the first thing he did was fire up the internet hate machine in response to a Cease & Desist.

Then he challenges them to a Quake match to settle it. Another bad move.

Then he posts a quiz that mocks Bethesda and actually doesn't help him in the way he thought it would as some people actually got some of the questions wrong.

[wtallis]

From Notch's blog:

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. [...] We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

Firing up the internet hate machine wasn't the first thing Notch did. He tried to open up a dialogue, before things got to the cease-and-desist stage. It didn't work. Bethesda's lawyers weren't interested in being reasonable.

Maintaining a trademark doesn't require constantly trying to expand it.