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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • About the EA Apex Legends patent for the ping system… remember that EA has patented some of the mechanics from Spore and The Sims such as the Sporepedia concept and the Sim body sliders in The Sims 4 where you can drag parts on their body to reshape them in the creator.

    Both appear to be not leased for free like the Apex Legends patent and as a result games are affected. Spiritual successors such as Elysian Eclipse and Life by You have to skirt around the patents - the latter is visibly shown to have regular style sliders where they’re located on a menu, and the developer for the former game complains about having to dodge the patents too.

    In other words Electronic Arts isn’t fully innocent. But Nintendo and Electronic Arts can get some favor from us by doing the same thing EA did with Apex Legends patents for the patents registered for The Legend of Zelda, Spore, and The Sims. Nintendo might be able to blow this away if they do this, unlike WB’s patents with the Nemesis system, which is still commonly complained about.


  • Justia works with US trademarks and law. In the US trademarks currently need to be renewed every 10 years - prior to the reduction in the late 1900s they appear to be needed to be renewed only every 20 years. I don’t live in the UK, so the apparent 30 year renew requirement is much longer.

    Also it seems Wizards of the Coast were somehow able to keep their Planescape UK trademark registration intact despite letting every other Planescape related trademark registration become canceled/abandoned. I’m not sure if they had to keep up with the trademark, or if registrations in the UK last much longer without having to be kept up to date. I guess they let it lapse at the time in the US for some reason, but when they started Dungeon Master’s Guild, I think they realized they should have live registrations for the legacy setting names they had to have more power under the law to manage the use of them. I think a company would want to keep other companies in check when they’re licensing certain IPs to others.