TheFlatline wrote:To be fair copyright law generally demands that you defend your copyright or you lose it. So any time WOTC thinks that they have a case that a jury might find reasonable, they pretty much *have* to release the hounds. If they don't defend copyright vigorously enough someone can come along, make a flat out clone of Magic, and then claim copyright lapsed because WOTC didn't defend their copyright and that would be at the very least a court battle that WOTC doesn't want.
The patent shit? *Shrugs* Early in a lawsuit like this you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
There are three major forms of IP law: copyrights, trademarks, and patents.
Ccopyright is ownership of the particular way in which an idea is expressed, but not the idea itself. You can't own the idea of a boy who lives with his abusive aunt and uncle and then discovers he is a wizard, but you can own the particular story of Harry Potter. Copyright lasts until it doesn't, which is usually a fuck off huge time. Copyright protects artists from having their content monetized without being represented, which is great. But copyright also kills transformative and derivative works, like remixes, tributes, parodies, mods, and fanfiction. WotC doesn't really have a copyright case unless Hex has stolen
creative (not functional) assets from MtG, such as the art or fluff text or very exact wording.
Trademark (and trade dress) is ownership of a brand identity. You can own the right to sell products with the Magic the Gathering logo and branding. You can't start a CCG line called Magick of the Gathered, because there is basically a zero percent chance that what you're trying to is legitimate or fair. Trademarks last until you stop using and defending them. Trademarks protect consumers from being deceived, which is literally the only unambiguously terrible thing IP laws stop - you can have very long and heated debates about the merits of everything else, but "you shouldn't lie to consumers about what you're selling them" is something pretty much everyone can agree on. But trademarks are also sometimes really stupid, like the fact that Publisher King has tried to trademark the words "Candy" and "Saga." Not together, separately. You heard about the Banner Saga snafu. Yes, that really was over the single word 'saga,' and the same company was until very recently claiming a trademark on the single word 'candy.' WotC is claiming they have a trademark (trade dress, really, which is just a trademark for your product's aesthetic so people don't impersonate your products that way) case, based primarily on the fact that the cards have all the same things on them mostly and that makes it look like their stuff and people will be confused somehow. Of course, Yu-Gi-Oh has the same layout, so what the fuck ever. Also: the layout is functional, and you just can't do that.
Patent is ownership of an idea or method. You can patent anything, except when you can't, at least until a court says you can. If that description cleared up exactly nothing, welcome to patent law. Patents expire much sooner than copyright, but still in a timeframe measured in decades. Ideally, patents reward the process of invention and development with an artificial monopoly, and this creates incentives for innovation. But you just gave someone a fucking monopoly. They no longer need to innovate jack shit and no one else can because you made it fucking illegal. Instead, they'll just incrementally improve and repatent their product every 20 years (competitors can't because it'd be a violation of the original patent) and everyone else can suck their balls. The most significant influence of patent law is that it kills millions of people each year on the low end. Big Pharma's IP lobbyists are arguably some of the most genocidal fucks on the planet. And while this sounds like flippant exaggeration, it really fucking isn't. The monopolies handed out to Big Pharma create artificial scarcity for and block innovation on life-saving drugs and the end result is millions of people die from easily preventable diseases because it's illegal to treat them cheaply or even develop ways to treat them more cheaply. WotC thinks they have a patent case, because they copyrighted a bunch of the ideas and methods for playing their game. Normally, they would not have a case, but courts just make this shit up as they go and there is a non-zero chance that they will hand WotC rights to the genre because they no goddamn idea what they're doing.
The moral of the story is that patent law is only ever used to stop markets from being competitive, and at this point it's so deeply corrupt and vile that the world would be better off just not having it. The idea of encouraging innovation by preventing competition is fundamentally fucked.
