{"id":22564,"date":"2014-03-18T19:36:15","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T00:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=22564"},"modified":"2014-03-18T19:36:15","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T00:36:15","slug":"experienced-points-cloning-is-good-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=22564","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Cloning is Good for You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just want to say <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/columns\/experienced-points\/11118-Cloning-is-Good-for-You\">a few words in defense of cloning<\/a>. I mean game cloning. Not biological cloning. I don&#8217;t know anything about biological cloning, except for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Up_the_Long_Ladder\">that one terrible TNG episode<\/a> where the writing was horrible and the cloning debate was so goofy and muddled it sounded like two Amish guys arguing Mac vs. PC. <\/p>\n<p>Where was I? Oh, videogame cloning, right. <\/p>\n<p>Of course, all of this stems from the recent Candy Crush controversy. On Facebook <a href=\"http:\/\/literatrix.blogspot.com\/\">Jennifer Snow<\/a> pointed out that King was kind of obligated to defend their Candy trademark, or they could risk losing it. That&#8217;s an interesting wrinkle to the discussion that I didn&#8217;t touch on in the main article (maybe I should have) so let&#8217;s talk about it here:<\/p>\n<p>What I think King SHOULD have done is to trademark &#8220;Candy Crush&#8221;. That way if some idiot came out with &#8220;Candy Crush Story&#8221; or &#8220;Candy Crush Adventure&#8221;, then King could take them to court and I think most people would be okay with that. But instead they trademarked &#8220;Candy&#8221;, meaning that nobody anywhere is ever allowed to have the word candy in their game, and then King is &#8220;obligated&#8221; to sue everyone who tries. That&#8217;s completely unreasonable<span class='snote' title='1'>The fact that they were GRANTED trademarks on common English words is also part of the problem.<\/span>. And then they trademarked &#8220;Saga&#8221; and went after completely unrelated games in unrelated genres where the claim of &#8220;market confusion&#8221; is ludicrous. They&#8217;re not trademark trolls because they&#8217;re defending their trademarks, they&#8217;re trademark trolls because they grabbed broad, overreaching trademarks and then enforced them way beyond what I think would be considered a reasonable requirement.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/news\/view\/132480-Candy-Crush-Studio-Drops-Candy-Trademark-Application-Update\">King has lost \/ given up one of these trademark fights in the US<\/a>. But they&#8217;re still holding onto it abroad. Here&#8217;s hoping they either clean up their act or get spanked in court. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just want to say a few words in defense of cloning. I mean game cloning. Not biological cloning. I don&#8217;t know anything about biological cloning, except for that one terrible TNG episode where the writing was horrible and the cloning debate was so goofy and muddled it sounded like two Amish guys arguing Mac [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[347],"class_list":["post-22564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-candy-crush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}