Here is the GoFundMe refund form if you feel you donated to this campaign in part or in full based on the misrepresentation that no cease and desist letter had been sent by Fizzer to initiate the fight: https://www.gofundme.com/contact/suggest/donor

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The defense has 60 days from April 9, 2021, to respond to the summons. That'll be Tuesday, June 8, 2021.

I checked PACER today to see if any new documents had been filed with the court- nothing interesting, just standard procedural stuff like Fizzer's lawyers waiving their right to a service of summons. It looks like the Judge in charge of the case initially has recused herself for having a financial interest in one of the named parties (she probably owns Activision stock) and the case has moved to a new judge. If you are curious about when to expect updates and how the rest of the case will go, the new judge filed an Initial Standing Order which more or less details how the rest of this process will go. I've uploaded this doc on my Drive so you can view it without having to get the doc from the court (https://drive.google.com/file/d/16slWvC-90H0LkxdPwGavkAKYB3YafYyZ/view?usp=sharing).

Edited 6/7/2021 05:56:19

thx

recused herself for having a financial interest in one of the named parties (she probably owns Activision stock)

bold of you to assume she isn't Fizzer's lover.

or she could just be a lover of the big, fortnite style game mode on call of duty.

Clearly no viable case for Activision. Warzone an established name, in use, for financial gain. This automatically qualifies it for copyright protection. Request for remuneration to sell the name are always done when one party wishes to obtain use of the name. This is not illegal or improper and is an excellent, established business model going back over 150 years. There is nothing in copyright law about one have more use for a name than another. It is simply, "I used the name for my business", "No one else established prior use of the name", "I have any documented use of the name of any kind for any duration" (website for more than 1 second), and "I used it in the course of making money" (establishes liability for the company attempting to take the name". The countersuit AGAINST Activition involves, 1) "They used the name I (Warzone) had previously established and made money from it" (Must be within the same industry, i.e. Computer Gaming), and/or, 2) "They damaged MY business in using the name". Both of these are definitely true as, 1) They named their game with the name Warzone and they made money from selling the games" and 2) Google (#1 search engine) does NOT show as first result MY business, causing MY potential customers to go to the wrong page, thereby costing me money.

The suit by Activision Fails and demands compensation (remuneration) AND the Countersuit Succeeds, as the copyright to the name was already established AND Warzone.com lost money. ALL Legal fees and costs for Warzone.com legal defence (including all documented time spent on that defense must be paid by Activition, AND all estimated losses to revenues do to improper website redirects in the search engine. FURTHER, if it can be show that Activision motivated Google to not list Warzone.com first (email of any kind), GOOGLE can be successfully sued for damages to Warzone.com income.

I am sure Warzone owners have been made aware of all this by their lawyers, but I thought I would throw all this out for the members.

All of this is not rocket science, it is well-established in court proceedings for thousands of cases that the lawyer will locate with 15 minutes of labor.

Edited 5/5/2021 04:31:44

But then again why would Activision sue knowing full well that the case is aginst them because every single thing u said karl about copy right is in fizzer's favour

they must have a trick up there sleeve.

The trick is money.

They have more, so they can fight for longer.

Here is the GoFundMe refund form if you feel you donated to this campaign in part or in full based on the misrepresentation that no cease and desist letter had been sent by Fizzer to initiate the fight: https://www.gofundme.com/contact/suggest/donor

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because every single thing u said karl about copy right

1) This is a trademark case, not a copyright case.
2) Take any unsolicited legal opinions (or advice) about specific cases on the internet with about 3-4 tons of salt. For malpractice and liability reasons, lawyers overwhelmingly avoid providing this type of legal commentary since, if it gets taken as legal advice and backfires, they may be on the hook (https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Liability+for+giving+bad+legal+advice+on+the+Web.-a020409874). So the vast majority of legal commentary about specific cases on the internet tends to come from people without legal training or people with some legal knowledge who vastly overestimate how much legal knowledge they have (like the cops on reddit's /r/legaladvice sub).

Edited 6/7/2021 05:56:30

I'm going to second what l4v.r0v said.

I just graduated law school and am currently studying for the bar exam. I'm also a registered practitioner with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, and have read Activision's complaint in detail. I worry that a lot of misinformation about this case has been shared, including on this thread. That misinformation may not have any consequences really; at the end of the day, a court will hear this case and qualified people will make arguments and decisions.

But I suggest you all keep an open mind and refrain from making conclusions from wrong information. I too will refrain from making any conclusions on this public thread, but I feel the need to say one thing - Activision's legal claims are far stronger than many of you are making them out to be.

Legal arguments are not as simple as one party being right and one party being wrong. Often, both parties can make good arguments. Activision can make many good arguments in this case.

If you wish to discuss morality, that's a separate question entirely. While the law strive to abide by morality, the law and morality are not always aligned. Whether Activision has a legally correct claim/defense under trademark law is not the same question as whether they are morally correct in this situation. And yes, the lawsuit involves trademark law, not copyright law. The two are different and should not be conflated.

I mean the gist of Activision's strength is that they're saying warzone is a commonly used term, and thus not protected, right? Obviously this very much depends on the case, but as I understand it the warzone game name had not been previously trademarked, right?

I think that if warzone, the game, had been trademarked this would have been a tougher case.

TL;DR: Law requires expertise. Unless you are legally trained, assume you do not understand the case and just do what you can to help Fizzer. Let's try to reduce the misinformation in this thread going forward.

The Twitch streamers (MrTrolldemort, CursonaFun, AbsolutelyEthan) have set great examples here. None of them pretended to know much about the case, they just outlined what's going on from a layperson perspective, and overall they've been successful in getting money into Fizzer's legal fund.

I mean the gist of Activision's strength is that they're saying warzone is a commonly used term, and thus not protected, right

No, that's only part of their response to (per their complaint) a claim by Warzone.com, LLC, that Activision is infringing on their trademark and causing consumer confusion.

This thread, the GoFundMe, and public communications about this lawsuit have an astounding amount of misinformation about even what's at issue in this case. Ignore secondhand sources, learn a little bit about trademark law in the US (no, your knowledge from another country is not sufficient), and then read Activision's complaint and look into relevant case law.

Otherwise assume you do not understand anything about the case at all (for most of us, it's very close to the truth) and treat it as a black box with the information that Activision has good lawyers, Fizzer has good lawyers, Activision is suing Fizzer, Fizzer believes this suit threatens Warzone as a whole, and there's a GoFundMe for you to donate to Fizzer's legal fund. Beyond that, well, if the law were this easy to figure out, lawyers wouldn't make so much money or stress so much about passing the bar exam. It's a hard field. It takes years of study to put things in their proper contexts and to figure out how court cases will go. Almost everyone who thinks they know the law but lacks formal legal training absolutely does not understand the law at all and should be ignored when they provide legal commentary.

If you work or study in a field that requires expertise, think about how hard it was for you to gather even a basic understanding of your field, how easy it is for people to be confidently misinformed about it, and how confused they might be by seeing basic, dumbed-down summaries of something in your field or by looking at something in your field that they do not have the context to understand. If you work in medicine, look at the public's understanding of vaccines and how confidently people spread vaccine misinformation. If you work in software, look at the public's understanding of things like cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence or how the internet works. If you work in finance and accounting, look at the public's understanding of... pretty much everything in your field.

Then apply that insight to this case and you'll get a picture of how completely confidently confused laypeople (including myself) are in this thread. Just find ways to help Fizzer (if you trust him + care about the game) and don't worry about understanding the case unless you are willing to devote a considerable amount of time and energy into learning American law. This is not something you can learn from reading the complaint, watching videos on YouTube, or running a Google search.

Edited 5/15/2021 21:45:24

well said

so what I have read says fizzer may have picked his name first and Activision after but since Activision has money they can come after him and take it away... using legal shenanigans and complex reasons why they should be able to do so... is this pretty accurate?

yea... it's frickin big money against the small guy. if I pick a name for my cologne in 1970 and it is called "Kardashian stank" and 20 years later the family comes after me to take it away because Khloe don't like it they can eat dirt.

change the last two letters.

No, that's not right at all Strangesme II. Please refer to the message by ⚙️t⚙️m⚙️t⚙️n

Edited 5/17/2021 06:52:00

"it the law were this easy to figure out, lawyers wouldn't make so much money or stress so much to pass the bar exam."
who was first? the rest is just lawyer shenanigans and mumbo jumbo that means nothing but they get paid "so much money" to figure it out.
Who was first?

this is about money and how Activision wants it for themselves. that is it.

I understand you have some misgivings about lawyers, especially with how they are portrayed in the media. Legal shenanigans are a real thing, but the law is about achieving public policy goals. You cannot simply state that everything is a legal shenanigan. Most of the law is routine, and common-place. And the law, as a whole, does achieve the public policy goals it intends to. You are looking at the exceptions and not the norm, perhaps out of some kind of resentment towards lawyers as a whole.

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TRADEMARK BASICS

About the legal problem at issue, I'll give you an analogy. Suppose you open a pizza store called "Bob's Palace" in Wisconsin. The store does reasonably well. But then, 2 years later, some guy named Bob wants to open a waterpark called "Bob's Palace" in Miami, Florida. The question for you is, can the first Bob stop the second Bob from using the name "Bob's Palace"?

Trademarks are specific, both in location and in scope. The fact that you open a pizza place does not mean you own the words "Bob's Palace" for all intents and purposes. Trademarks are designed to prevent "unfair competition." "Unfair competition" in this context would exist if a reasonable consumer would confuse the waterpark Bob's Palace with the pizza place Bob's Palace. Due to how different the two brands are and how unlikely it is that there is any market overlap between the two brands, you'd be hard-pressed to state that the waterpark is taking any business from the pizza place, let alone unfairly competing with them.

But you must not mistake "unfair competition" with normal fair competition. The unfairness is a requirement. Many of you correctly point out that Activision's actions may damage Warzone. But the mere act of damaging Warzone isn't sufficient to say they are "unfairly competing" with Warzone. In the above analogy, if the Bob's Palace pizza place started to lose sales because a new pizza place, Sally's Corner, opened down the street, would that be unfair competition?

No. Competition, by it's very nature, often involves one brand suffering at the hands of another. You need to cite specific bad or anti-competitive conduct to say the competition is "unfair."

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APPLYING THE BASICS

Now let me ask you another question. Let's suppose there was another "Warzone" game that came out before this one. But that "warzone" game was completely different; there is literally no commonality other than the name. Is Fizzer's version of Warzone" unfairly competing with these previous Warzone games? In other words, is Fizzer's version of the game stealing customers that this earlier game would otherwise have from the NAME alone?

I want you to keep this answer in mind, because it's no longer a hypothetical. It's reality. There were several games called "Warzone" that existed before this game. Now again, I ask you, is Fizzer's game of Warzone unfairly competing with them?

And lastly, I ask this: If you say that Fizzer's game isn't violating the trademark rights of the previous warzone games, how is Activision violating the trademark rights of THIS game? Do you have a logically consistent way of reconciling the two?

It seems to me that the only logically consistent way to resolve the two is to say that Activision's actions are worse because they are a large gaming giant. I know there is a lot of anger towards Activision for other valid reasons, and there is a fear that they are using their money to get an unfair advantage. But stop and think about it. If they weren't a big gaming giant, would there even be this much outrage? The fact that Activision is a giant company isn't reason enough to say they are guilty. If you think it is, then what you really want is class warfare, not any "fair" adjudication of the law.

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CONCLUSION

I'm not going to go into the actual legal analysis of this case because 1) I'm not on the bar yet, and 2) as someone who will be admitted to the bar, I have an ethical obligation to not make careless statements about pending cases. But I hope I have given you some things to consider. The major thing I wish for you to take from this is that the situation is much more nuanced and complex than you are making it out to be. And it certainly isn't just "legal shenanigans."

Edited 5/17/2021 08:15:26

you are saying since there were games called warzone before fizzer changed the name from warlight that future companies that decide to change their name to warzone has the right to claim it? if one of the other older games (still in business) had issue with this one than they win. if fizzer turned on an older company and said they are not allowed to use it anymore because he is bigger and can afford lawyers then he would be a huge turd and should lose in a court of law. Simple.