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Marvel sues computer game for allowing players to create Marvel-like characters. My immediate reaction, without much exposure to the game: direct copyright (and perhaps trademark) infringement -- possible, depending entirely on the marketing materials; contributory and vicarious trademark infringement (which essentially alleges that the game company encourages players to violate trademark law) -- ludicrous, since the players are not using the characters to sell anything; and contributory and vicarious copyright infringement (alleging that the company encourages players to violate copyright law) -- very interesting and potentially tricky. It's not quite the same as suing Crayola for providing the tools for kids to draw Wolverine, but it's definitely on the spectrum.
So maybe I should post my review of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, to continue with the theme. Grant Morrison et al. New X-Men vols. 114-154: I lack the background to tell how Morrison’s run fits in with X-Men history; I do get that he’s trying to do something new when the first line of dialogue is, “Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now.” Busting things apart just doesn’t solve all the world’s problems, so the X-Men struggle over the course of many issues to figure out what will. My expectations were formed by the movies, so the presence of Emma Frost and absence of Rogue required some adjustment, but that wasn’t the biggest problem I had. That, frankly, was the art. The women! Emma and Jean were differentiated by (1) hair color and (2) Emma dressing like a skanky ho. Her X-costume was thigh-high white boots, over-the-elbow white gloves, white hot pants that rose to a point at her navel with a zipper down the middle to her labia, and what I can only describe as a collar that went down to a point in the middle of her breasts (zipper in all the way down, too), then must have wrapped around her back to come around and hug about a third of her breasts. ‘Cause, you see, that way there was an “X” of bare flesh. Clever, no?
Um, no. Actually, blech. When I Googled for images of Emma, a large number of them came back in a beaver-shot pose, which surprises me not at all.
Hank McCoy aside, the men weren’t all that well differentiated either, except insofar as their props clearly distinguished them: wheelchair and baldness, visor, leather and stubble and pointy hair. But the women drove me nuts, especially since Emma was a bitch and Jean was a madonna, mostly, when she wasn’t being Dark Phoenix. If we’re going to do something new, what about making the women define themselves by something other than their relationship to Scott Summers? Here I think the art signalled an underlying problem: Morrison seemed to want to revolutionize the setup, giving the X-Men a media strategy and a set of – less unrealistic? more varied? – human opponents, but then there had to be aliens and a devastated future that could only be averted by – well, I don’t want to spoil you, but then I’m honestly not sure what happened. Ultimately, negation of what came before isn’t a positive agenda, which can only be supplied by an idea of what the characters are other than their props, and I didn’t feel that existed. As I said, I don’t know the history, so this might have been a very different experience for a prior fan of the comic, but it certainly didn’t make me want to stick around in X-land.
So maybe I should post my review of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, to continue with the theme. Grant Morrison et al. New X-Men vols. 114-154: I lack the background to tell how Morrison’s run fits in with X-Men history; I do get that he’s trying to do something new when the first line of dialogue is, “Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now.” Busting things apart just doesn’t solve all the world’s problems, so the X-Men struggle over the course of many issues to figure out what will. My expectations were formed by the movies, so the presence of Emma Frost and absence of Rogue required some adjustment, but that wasn’t the biggest problem I had. That, frankly, was the art. The women! Emma and Jean were differentiated by (1) hair color and (2) Emma dressing like a skanky ho. Her X-costume was thigh-high white boots, over-the-elbow white gloves, white hot pants that rose to a point at her navel with a zipper down the middle to her labia, and what I can only describe as a collar that went down to a point in the middle of her breasts (zipper in all the way down, too), then must have wrapped around her back to come around and hug about a third of her breasts. ‘Cause, you see, that way there was an “X” of bare flesh. Clever, no?
Um, no. Actually, blech. When I Googled for images of Emma, a large number of them came back in a beaver-shot pose, which surprises me not at all.
Hank McCoy aside, the men weren’t all that well differentiated either, except insofar as their props clearly distinguished them: wheelchair and baldness, visor, leather and stubble and pointy hair. But the women drove me nuts, especially since Emma was a bitch and Jean was a madonna, mostly, when she wasn’t being Dark Phoenix. If we’re going to do something new, what about making the women define themselves by something other than their relationship to Scott Summers? Here I think the art signalled an underlying problem: Morrison seemed to want to revolutionize the setup, giving the X-Men a media strategy and a set of – less unrealistic? more varied? – human opponents, but then there had to be aliens and a devastated future that could only be averted by – well, I don’t want to spoil you, but then I’m honestly not sure what happened. Ultimately, negation of what came before isn’t a positive agenda, which can only be supplied by an idea of what the characters are other than their props, and I didn’t feel that existed. As I said, I don’t know the history, so this might have been a very different experience for a prior fan of the comic, but it certainly didn’t make me want to stick around in X-land.
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I've gotten pretty disgusted with Marvel over the past couple of years. I don't read comics as much as I used to but I've noticed that they've gone crazy with re-inventing just about each title. In many cases it really wasn't necessary.
It's not all bad -- some of the revamped Spider-Man stuff is hilarious. And Daredevil is pretty interesting since he got "outed". Other than that, though, it's aggravating.
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I would imagine that Marvel is arguing that CoH can control the infringement (through more aggressive filtering of character names and attributes and post-notification deletion--I have my doubts about this) and that it benefits directly from allowing it to happen, because some people do join the game (and pay the fee) in order to be able to simulate their favorite heroes.
As with a lot of these cases, I expect much of it will come down to the judge's attitude towards "the youth of today"/"hackers" and CoH's ability to educate him or her on the realities on the ground.
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