Bibin, ill check on some games business forums I know, Ill check it isn't owned by someone, it would be hard to own, I can only see the name Battleships being trademarked at best, the game I cannot see being owned, people played it during the 20s at least, its a publicly owned game, no games company made it up, its a bit like copyrighting football or tennis.
Why does it seem like that was towards some one other than you Dean?
You got me there, not sure what you see, Its a fair point on issues of copyright, in this case the IP is not copyrighted, but the name is a trademark on the name 'Battleship', call it something else and you are OK.
"just checked, Hasbro owns the trademark on the name Battleship, so you can make the game only you have to give it a different name." It seems as though you have two accounts and are thinking that your logged in as a different one. and what do you mean by "Your okay"
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Peblo Custom ratings must be 50 characters or less
Registered 05/07/2002
Points 185
16th March, 2007 at 03:52:09 -
Dude, billybob, no more drugs; it makes perfect sense. Also, if you quote something you might as well as spell it right too.
you are = you're
As far as copyrights go you'll be fine to make battleship as long as you call it something else. I doubt any big business like Hasbro wouldn't really notice unless your game became a big hit and you made tons of money for them to take in a lawsuit.
"Isn't it always amazing how we characterize a person's intelligence by how closely their thinking matches ours?"
~Belgarath
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If it is NOT a battleship game copy, it could be called something varied enough like "Super Battleship Commander" without problem. The less varied the name, the more risk of a problem.
If it IS a clone of Battleship the game's mechanics, then make sure you do not copy any element of its name, PERIOD.
Because what they will show in court is that a reasonable person would conclude that the 2 are related, and therefore that the second one, yours, is an endorsed product of their company ... which isn't true, and therefore economically hurts their brand identity in the market.
So "Battleship Commander" is not an acceptable battleship name ...
but "Destroyer", "Cruiser Attack", "Battle on the High Seas", "Sea Captain", etc. All are.
A corporate copyright (US) lasts for 95 years(last I checked, thanks to Sonny Bono). A trademark (again, US) is effectively immortal (needs to be renewed every 20 years, last I checked).
Do not use anything even closely resembling the name "Battleship". The mechanics as such are just fine. I've even seen the game mechanics in a mini-game in zelda.
Radix, I have the art done on that project, was trickier than I thought, doing 2d stuff one has to have layers on top of each other and all to scale right so they place within the grid for nice placement, but I got it in the end and placed into MMF2 all ready for the click part.
Ill write up the doc on Saturday UK time and send it to you if its all cool.
Radix -
"Dean Avanti Said:
just checked, Hasbro owns the trademark on the name Battleship, so you can make the game only you have to give it a different name."
>.> Unless I Missed something huge when I was skipping over all the other text I'm pretty sure that He was making the game not somebody else.
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