Aug 062011
An odd series of events has taken place recently with Mojang being sued by Bethesda over the usage of the word “Scroll” in their upcoming game. While it may seem like Bethesda is absolutely obsessed with protecting their copyright over their ever-important series “The Elder Scrolls” it actually turns out that Bethesda is not suing Mojang, at least not directly. Those who are attempting a legal battle with Mojang are actually the brass over at Zenimax (the parent company of Bethesda), and while I haven’t gained enough details to “tell all” within this article I have gained a picture of the offical legal documents sent to Mojang.
From what I’ve heard over the years and from what the ZeniMax wikipedia page says, ZM was founded by a lawyer and the founder of Bethesda so they could have a media company to own several other developers but leaving Bethesda’s name as a game company alone. Bethesda was part of ZeniMax the first year that ZeniMax was in business, it’s not like it was some random company that bought them up.
Any legal action taken by Bethesda would be through ZeniMax. Do you think a legal letter from some dinky little developer deep within the bowels of Activision would have any weight behind it next to a Activision-Blizzard one?
This whole lawsuit makes no sense. Sure, I can see how a gamer could confuse a Scrolls game with an Elder Scrolls game, but just because a word from your title is in their title, doesn’t mean they owe you money.
Well this is akward… Notch and Todd sat down and had a friendly interview not too long ago. Then again the oblivion/skyrim dev team love minecraft, and notch loves oblivion alot. The devs probably aren’t the ones stirring up trouble.
It’s a shame Mojang has to get caught up in one of these stupid legal battles. Zenimax deals with Bethesdas legal problems, but this is going to take a ton of time away from notch himself.
Whatever, zenimax just cost the folks at bethseda a sale from me. I’m upgrading my computer for the shooters coming out and Skyrim was among those I WAS going to buy, but if they want to stand up for this kind of crap, I guess they don’t need my money.