Bethesda takes Minecraft studio to court over a name
Yuliya Geikhman August 7, 2011 - 1:02 amBethesda lawyers disapprove of Markus “Notch” Persson’s decision to name a second game Scrolls – and they are prepared to go to court over it.
Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson reports on his personal blog that Bethesda feels the name Scrolls would conflict with their trademark for the title “The Elder Scrolls.” Bethesda first contacted Persson about half a year ago. At that point, Presson proposed a compromise: he would never add any words in front of “Scrolls,” so that all subsequent expansions or sequels would have additional words following the word Scrolls instead. That seems fair enough, especially considering that The Elder Scrolls is not, as Persson points out, about “scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.”
Still, yesterday Persson received a lengthy letter from a Swedish law firm demanding that he stop using the name Scrolls. The lawyers are prepared to sue Persson – in fact, they have already paid the fee to the Swedish court – and are asking for a sum of money even before the proceedings begin.
Persson feels fairly confident that Bethesda does not have much of a case against him, and he hopes that this is simply the automatic following of protocol. Aside from that, he points out that “the implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary.”
