Copyright Help Needed - The Impossible Test!

Hi,

There is a thing about if a neutral person may mistake one for the other, based on the names being similar, this may fall into that category.

If I was you, gather as many facts as you can, from them and any other sources you may know of, and use them to decide your next step.

Not knowing all the facts and details, this would be my best advice.

Good luck and I hope it works out for you.

David

 

I remember a former topic on copyright. Maybe you would want to check that out and ask a couple of questions to the OP of that one. He may have learned a couple of things on the issue.

Good luck

 

Trademark and copyright are two completely different things.

You can't copyright an idea: only the expression of that idea. If you have borrowed the actual expression of the concept (i.e., reproduced some of the sam questions, and answers or puzzles in your game), then you have violated copyright.

Trademark is another matter all together. If they have trademarked "The Impossible Quiz" and you are calling your game "The Impossible Test," there is a good potential for confusion and therefore a potential violation of trademark.

But please, for the love o' god, don't decide what to do based on what you read on an online forum. In fact, NEVER ask for legal advice on an online forum, because you will won't get fact, you'll get opinion.

Consult an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law and learn the real truth.

 

Gravity Jim is right. Get advice from a lawyer.

Having said that, unless you copied questions or graphics from them directly, there is no violation of copyright.

As to the question of trademark violation, in my opinion, The Impossible Test and The Impossible Quiz are close enough in name that a reasonable person might be confused by the two by name alone.

If a court were to reach a similar conclusion, I can't imagine anything beyond a name change being required of you though, but then again I am not a lawyer (but I play one on TA).

I think your bigger issue will be dealing with Apple. If inXile wants to, they can just ask Apple to remove your app from the app store due to pending litigation. Apple has done it many times in the past, and I believe they would do it again in your case if asked.

Or you could ask Apple to remove The Impossible Quiz first!

 

I'll be completely frank - I have been mistaked by the title. I played The Impossible Quiz flash game and when I saw The Impossible Test on the AppStore I downloaded it thinking it is the same game. And I'm a dev and a long time gamer, not an "uneducated fool"

However - I absolutely agree that most of the similarities ended once the game was loaded. Yeah, the concept of asking questions is similar and the fact that answers are unexpected is similar too. But the way you structured the game is very different. Questions are completely different. Graphics are different...

To sum up - I agree with their claim that your game's title can be confusing to the consumer. However, while you are borrowing from their game, I do not see your game as a copy of theirs

So... I'd say - change the name, leave the game intact and things should be fine

But I'm not a lawyer (not even a US citizen )

EDIT: Mind Juice - you're not just a "lawyer" here, but IIRC you also like to play the role of devil's advocate

 

This is correct. Things can become hazy under specific circumstances, but there isn't a direct rip-off.

We dealt with this a little with Snails almost a decade ago. It was a direct rip-off of the popular Worms games, but our work was completely original. They really couldn't do much except compete with us. By the time they got around to porting Worms (3 years later) Snails had already been established on the platform and they lost a huge potential market.

The same is true with the Impossible Test.Basically you have proven there is a market for it, and it has NOTHING to do with The Impossible Quiz. What the makers of the Impossible Quiz want to do is actually take your place, and hope that people grab their game in the absence of yours.

Don't let them do it. Tell them to **** off.

 

well do youself a favour and let youre lawyer tell them to **** off.. in his kind of words..

assuming 4,5 million units should at least gave you a bit of cash flow an lawyer should be something you have.

 

Consult a lawyer who specialize in trademarks and intellectual property disputes, preferably one experienced in the video game industry.

Ignore all other advice and opinions from this forum.

 

You should definitely stand your ground here. Get a specialized lawyer to look over all the information, and then let them write inXile a letter back.

Best of luck.

 

Who me?

I'd just change the name to "Angry Doodle Flight Birds Moron Control Test" and be done with it.

Avoid controversy I always say!

 

Inixile long ago lost any credibility after creating a game that didn't work and instead of fixing it, just took it off the store and kept all the money from it. Good luck to you, in my opinion I would most likely buy your game if it had a different name and wasn't so close to their stupid game. Your game sounds original and why not find a great original name, I'm sure the users of TA would love to brainstorm names for codes or something.

 

There's no U.S. registered trademark for The Impossible Quiz. Also, AppShopper says that your game was released two months before theirs.

If there weren't much money involved, I'd spend the couple of hundred bucks (today) to get the name trademarked and ask Apple to take the other game down. But if you're making as much money as you should be from a game that sold that many copies, you should just get a lawyer.

edit: I would have asked this question in the private developer forum, just to limit the number of eyes on it.

 

the problem is the web based version of the game was out long before....

 

From my experience in coming up with a Trademarkable company name some years ago, i's unlikely that you could Trademark "Impossible Test" for a video game. If you could I suspect these other guys would have registered "Impossible Quiz" before they tried to lean on you. Or maybe you (and/or they) could register but neither of you would be able to defend the name if you/they tried to accuse someone of using something too close to it.

The Trademark Lawyer we spoke to was very insistant that we chose a safe name for this reason. Some of the suggestions he advised against seemed pretty spurious. Record Labels and Networking companies with one of the two words the same were deemed problematic because they were in entertainment and computers respectively.

Anyway, that's very off topic, the point i'm trying to make is that you are probably not talking Trademarks and the world of Copyright is altogether more fuzzy.

Maybe you should get back to them and suggest that if they do anything stupid and manage to get Apple to temporarily pull the app (which could happen) you will sue for lost earnings. That might just scare them off

 

Just to clear things up:

1. You won't find every registered trademark in a free web search, so going on the assumption that the name is unregistered is a fallacy.

2. There's a good deal more to trademark law than whether or not the mark has been registered. Cases are often decided on the basis of which party has more widely distributed or zealously defended the mark, not who "registered" it first.

3. Stop offering unfounded opinion on the Internet. In fact, that's not just a good idea for this thread, but for life in general.

4. Call a damn lawyer. Until you do, you might as well just read the inside lid of the Candyland box and figure it out from that.

 

My last sentence was kind of a joke, hence the smiley. The rest of it was anecdotal about Trademarks and I stand by what I said, it's pretty unlikely that Impossible quiz would be a defendable trademark. I agree, talk to a lawyer, I was simply trying to be reassuring. I just should have stopped typing earlier...

 

Your not in breach of copyright unless you used their questions/ content... So your safe there...

The only potential problem would therefore be from a trademark HOWEVER
1) From a quick search it isn't a registered trademark.
2) In order to register a trademark it must be a name not "descriptive" of the product. So you cant trademark the name "fish" pertaining to the selling of fish... And similarly I would say it's impossible to trademark "The Impossible Quiz/ Test etc" as it's entierly descriptive of the product itself and therefore cannot be trademarked... So I'd say neither you or they will manage to get that trademark tbh. What could potentially be trademarked in this case is a particular look of the logo/ title etc... But assuming you didn't try and duplicate there Logo/ Use identical fonts etc you should be fine...

Based on that I'd reccomend just ignoring them... Neither of you have any right to demand anything from either of the other in terms of trademark or copyright strength based on my understanding of the laws pertaining to Copyright and Trademarks (in the UK at least).

Note: This is advice based on conversations with my lawyer when establishing the studio's name. It is based on my understanding of UK law and may be different in the USA etc.

 

Ask the impossible quiz maker to provide you with proof that they own the trademark (documents). if they dont have it, then there is no issue here.

as for me, i prefer to avoid these stuffs. if they really have copyright on it, just chg the name..

Nonpossible Test - aka The Impossible Test.

lol

 

If you're still unsure what to do, in short:

- If you're making a lot of money off the app, you should have enough to speak to a lawyer.
- If you're only making a small number of sales from the app, your brand-name may not be worth fighting a legal battle over and you may just decide to take the simple route and change the name. Even contacting an intellectual property lawyer to discuss the law on this matter could cost upwards of $1000, and there have been cases where the rename of an app has actually increased App store exposure and sales numbers,
- If you fall into neither of the above two categories, you could always just ignore the email altogether and wait to see if they take any further action. 99.9% of legal threats are never carried out, but don't hold it against me if you do this and end up being in the 0.01 percentile.