A small movie manufacturing firm you’ve by no means heard of known as Stellarblade is suing Sony and Shift Up over using Stellar Blade on this yr’s hit action-adventure.
It’s straightforward to learn that opening line, assume it’s a kind of opportunistic circumstances that follows any profitable IP (“I as soon as wrote down the thought for a person with the facility of spiders on the again of a serviette!”), and roll your eyes. However within the case of Stellarblade Vs. Stellar Blade, as I demand all authorized paperwork should write it, issues are a bit of bit extra nuanced.
Trademark regulation is boring and tedious, however one of many parts that’s continuously forgotten at any time when circumstances like this come up is that if you wish to maintain your trademark, you have to defend it. If you wish to know what it seems like to look at your model’s identify get subsumed by others to the purpose the place its particular person id is completely misplaced, ask Escalator, Hovercraft, and Trampoline. If an organization isn’t seen to be vigorously defending its model, it may well lose the authorized proper to carry its emblems.
So yeah, if I owned a movie firm known as Stellarblade, and unexpectedly some vastly larger company comes alongside and makes use of the time period, destroying my probabilities of ever being discovered on Google, and eternally having my enterprise related to a online game I’ve obtained nothing to do with, I’d be fairly narked. I won’t, nevertheless, think about overreaching to the purpose of wanting the already-released online game to be destroyed.
As reported by IGN, that is the predicament confronted by Griffith Chambers Mehaffey, proprietor of the Louisiana movie manufacturing firm Stellar Blade for the final 14 years. Come the recreation’s identify change in 2022, when it switched from Undertaking Eve to Stellar Blade, Mehaffey observed his Google rating had plummeted to nothing, and was fairly understandably upset. He claims that it has value him giant quantities of cash, and is placing his enterprise at risk, having beforehand dominated the search time period since he registered www.stellarblade.com in 2006.
Nonetheless, Mehaffey’s case does begin to look a bit of extra wobbly once you study he didn’t register his trademark till after Shift Up modified the identify of its recreation to Stellar Blade, submitting his trademark in 2023. He then, based on IGN, despatched a stop and desist letter to Shift Up. However, once more, copyright is assumed, not registered, and I’m actually glad I’m not a lawyer as a result of this entire space is a huge mess.
Issues then get sillier once you have a look at the case Mehaffey is placing ahead. That begins with claims that his firm’s brand is “confusingly comparable” to Stellar Blade’s (they give the impression of being nothing alike), at which level there’s the unlucky echo of the years of limitless trolling wrought by Tim Langdell and his makes an attempt to personal the phrase “Edge.”
However the “request for aid” is the place issues get actually weird. In keeping with IGN, the injunction asks that “Shift Up and Sony be prevented from utilizing Stellar Blade or another identify much like it, in addition to asking they hand over all supplies of their possession with ‘Stellar Blade’ on them so Mehaffey and Stellarblade can destroy them.”
Yeah, that’s…not going to occur. And as a lot because the search engine optimization injury should really damage, it’s additionally laborious to think about that his proudly owning “stellarblade.com” hasn’t confirmed no less than considerably advantageous, given the probability his web site has most likely acquired significantly extra site visitors, slightly than much less, within the final yr or so. In any case, one factor’s for sure: the publicity this story has created means you now have heard of small movie manufacturing firm Stellarblade.
We’ve reached out to Mehaffey to ask about his motivations and intentions.
.
