Marvel Sues over City of Heroes [Nov 12, 2004, 10:40 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Marvel sues two companies over role-playing game is an article announcing
the Comic Book Publisher is suing NCsoft and Cryptic Studios over City of
Heroes. No word on whether Matt Murdock is handling Marvel's case:
The lawsuit claims South Korea-based NCSoft and San Jose-based Cryptic Studios violated Marvel's trademark characters in their game City of Heroes. Marvel seeks unspecified damages and an injunction against the two companies to stop using its characters.
The personal computer game enables players to design superheroes' look and abilities and then battle against other players' characters in a virtual city. Like similar so-called massively multiplayer role-playing games where thousands of players can be playing simultaneously at any given time, City of Heroes claims to offer a myriad of combinations so that no two players' characters are exactly the same.
But in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, Marvel argues that the game's character creation engine easily allows players to design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including "The Incredible Hulk."
In a way this suit is very similar to the ones involving software like kazaa and napster. CoH doesn't directly violate anyones copyrights but it provides the tools for others to violate the copyrights. While I think this is ridiculous there is precedent and this law suit shouldn't be ignored. If Marvel wins then providing software that enables the violation of copyrights could be stopped. If you stretch this it could cover mod tools for most all games. This is all pretty far fetched, but then, once upon a time, I thought the idea of the dmca was also pretty far fetched.
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