Comment by boredpudding
4 days ago
Yeah sorry man, that's clearly IKEA so it's obvious they had to act on it. Can't sell IKEA-branded games without their permission. Even on their Steam trailer, the first second is clearly IKEA. Just changing the name is not enough. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1593010/The_Store_is_Clos...
Sometimes it's not that deep. Sometimes the cute little indie dev just made a mistake.
The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.
No reasonable person would have been confused into thinking it was an official IKEA game; IANAL, but it seems unlikely to me that IKEA would have ultimately prevailed in court, though a simple change to the color of the logo would probably have been helpful to the devs of the game.
It's a direct ripoff of https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008, a popular sci-fi horror story set in an IKEA. At the time the game was also using IKEA's brand colors.
The game description on Steam even explicitly mentions "SCP Foundation", which the creator also doesn't have the rights to use unless the whole game is Creative Commons-licensed.
IANAL either, but could this be a trademark issue? My understanding is that if you don’t defend your trademarks you risk legally losing them.
You can only defend your trademark with respect to product categories that you actually market. Unless IKEA were in the business of selling parody video games, their trademark doesn't apply.
Wait... is that why IKEA just put out a parody video game?
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Unethical IP lawyers spew that nonsense all the time. Failing to enforce your trademark against a tiny alleged infringer has no effect on your trademark rights at all.
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Yeah, that seems like the type of thing that should at least in theory be fair use.
That's not how trademark works.
If you don't defend your mark, you lose it.
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Depending of the court, if you don't protect your trademarks you can lose them.
Law is rarely remotely reasonable, just because you (or society) think a certain way, does not mean law does.
Society however determines how we respond when a company abuses a law. Just because suing indie developers may be the best action for IKEA to protect their trademarks does not mean we should let it be the best action for them overall.
Do you know what parody is?
That's mentioned in the article:
> Further, there’s at least the possibility on the part of the developer to claim that such usage is a “parody,” with parody and satire protected at the highest levels of American law through the application of First Amendment freedom of speech rights. However, courts will often require actual commentary to be made in order to extend such protections. In that way, a store name like “I CAN’T A” (or something far more clever) has a greater chance of succeeding than simply using a play on the word “store” in Scandinavian.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks
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Trademarks are lost when they are not defended. That is entirely separate from fair use in copyright law.
This explains why Apple has sued The Onion a dozen or so times for all the parodies that infringed on trademarks belonging to the corporation.
https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-lapt...
https://theonion.com/new-ipad-offers-3-months-of-something-c...
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Trademark is about preventing someone's brand for being confused for another. Unless someone was confusing this for being an official IKEA product I'm not sure why it would be in the ballpark of trademark.
There is also trade dress of course but that isn't really related.
No, tradmarks can be parodied too. It's a first amendment protection, and extremely common in movies, TV and video games.
If the developer worked with a lawyer they could've gotten any suit by IKEA (this wasn't a suit yet, just a cease and desist letter) quickly dismissed.
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This is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.”
Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.
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Always been curious - what are some examples of trademarks being lost due to not being defended?
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Just waiting for The Coca Cola company to sue Bethesda for having Nuka Cola.
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I dunno, I've read a novel that was set in a store that was very clearly meant to be IKEA (https://www.amazon.com/Horrorstor-Grady-Hendrix/dp/159474526...) but was also very clearly not officially IKEA. Where do you draw the line?
> The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.
The game is in very active development. The most recent alpha was published just four days ago. [0]
[0]: https://steamdb.info/app/1845400/
Kind of reminds me of a college classmate back in the 80s made a Hypercard game which he had called Escape from Harvey Mudd but which the college asked (maybe demanded?) that it be renamed as it started to get distribution so the more commonly seen version was called Escape from Grid Tech. I would guess that there might have been some reputational concerns as that classmate was one of the people who dropped out of Mudd during my time there (the late 80s cohorts had a lot of people, myself included, who had wavered between humanities and sciences and after exposure to life in the sciences decided to opt for the humanities instead—most of us ended up doing programming for a living having no marketable skills post-college. The one person from my freshman year suite who actually finished his degree at Mudd went on to become a music professor).
Did not expect to see Mudd mentioned in the comment section on HN for an IKEA Skyrim mod... Not really surprised the admin was like that given the name, but I hope things worked out well for y'all.
Is IKEA the only furniture store in the world? I do not see any IKEA branding in the trailer.
IKEA is the only furniture store with a four-letter name in that same typeface in yellow on a blue building even though it is called 'STYR' here. It is the only furniture store using that uniform, also blue-yellow, for its personnel. The game maker clearly used IKEA as an inspiration but forgot that 'inspiration' is not the same as 'duplication'. They could have made the building red, used a serif typeface and a 7-character name, dressed their 'personnel' in red-green uniforms, etc. and IKEA would not have bothered them. Now, they did, and right they were.
The factory builder game Captain of Industry has a building you can add on to a settlement which sells household goods and furniture to the population. It's a blue building with yellow trim and a big sign on the front that says IDEA. I wonder if this is just small potatoes enough of a parody that IKEA wouldn't care about it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/captain_of_industry/comments/1vtbz8...
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Trade dress is protected in addition to the actual brand marks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
I've never been in an IKEA but it looks like Backrooms to me
did Backrooms also infringe on IKEA or maybe every furniture store has the same concept
Some of the early backrooms lore and levels were based on noclipping in furniture stores or even IKEA directly since it was all fan made stuff not caring about the legal ramifications.
I tried to find a link but it’s impossible now that backrooms is a popular IP
And having been in an empty IKEA, it definitely had that liminal feel
>The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.
Yeah that’s crazy I wonder why