What’s it going to take to get Hacker News commenters to stop perpetuating the myth that trademark holders are required to be litigious assholes if they don’t want their trademarks to lapse?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This is a baffling response. You posited something very specific and interesting that other commenters are not touching on (that "must defend to retain" is exaggerated), but when asked about it, you responded with the same generic point as all the other commenters ("it's frivolous") - as though you had never even said the interesting thing in the first place.
But there is no logic or legal ground for trademarking the word "monster" or the green/white colours in a logo. It is all about bullying smaller companies using their much higher budget.
When you pay for an expensive legal team on retainer you probably need to get them to start bringing in money for the org to justify their size. From the article it seems like they just troll for any sort of putative copyright violation and just roll the dice.
Suing indie game developers is not a way to do it. There's a good chance these lawyers need to be paid much more for the time of dealing with this case than the devs ever had available.
Maybe most are small fish, but maybe some are big fish too. Maybe catching all of these small fish gives you precedence when you do go up to face some big fish in the future, so the benefits to these costs perhaps will just materialize in the future.