Bethesda Tells Minecraft Creator: Cease and Desist

dotarray writes with news that Notch, creator of Minecraft, has received a letter from Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda, demanding that he rename his company's new game, which is called Scrolls. They claim it bears too strong a resemblance to The Elder Scrolls. Notch said: "First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is. ... I agree that the word 'Scrolls' is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image. The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games."

Elder than the Elder Scrolls

[BitterKraut]

are Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish, Myth, Wonderland... loved these in the 80s/early 90s and still do. A 5,25" floppy disk, wrapped around a rolling pin, that's my earliest encounter with scrolls in video games.

Re:Can't you not

[Gorobei]

Yep, and it's pretty settled: Microsoft lost in the USA when claiming "Microsoft Windows" somehow gave them the exclusive right to the common word "Windows." And don't even get me started about that "edge" crap.

If you write a game about X (e.g. scrolls,) there is basically no way in the USA you can be prevented from using X in your product's name. It is descriptive, and can not be the exclusive property of someone else.