Trademark law is a very complex aspect of the legal system, as it takes more than possessing a similar or even identical name for it to count as a violation of a person or company’s intellectual property rights.
According to the Trade Marks Act 1994 (section 10), a person infringes on a registered trademark if someone uses an identical mark in relation to identical goods and services, or when someone uses an identical or similar mark in relation to goods or services similar to those the mark is registered for.
This can and has led to many legal grey areas, such as King Games filing a notice of opposition against Stoic Software due to the latter’s game, The Banner Saga, allegedly infringing on King’s Candy Crush Saga.
In many cases, this is done out of a belief that they must protect their intellectual property or risk weakening those rights.
However, one strange exception to this is the story of Tim Langdell, CEO of Edge Games, a company formed in 1990 from the ashes of Softek Software.
Since then, Mr Langdell would regularly file suit against many different companies in the computer game space that used the word “edge” in them.
This started in 1992 against the game Planet’s Edge and would escalate to incorporate not only several other game titles but also video game hardware, comics and a website called EdgeGamers.
In 2001, Edge Games attempted to revoke the trademark of the 1995 arcade fighting game Soul Edge. This revocation failed on all grounds, faltering on the delay in filing suit and the fact that Soul Edge itself had been released on the PlayStation console as Soul Blade specifically to avoid this issue.
Namco would go a step further with its sequel Soulcalibur, deliberately misspelling the word to avoid potential infringement. Mobigame’s Edge would be taken down in 2009 as a result of persistent legal threats.
Finally, Electronic Arts would in 2009 apply to have Edge Games’ trademarks, which would lead to a four-year legal case which intertwined with a connected breach of contract case in the UK, Future Publishing v The Edge Interactive Media [2011].
After a somewhat farcical trial, which included a moment when Mr Langdell claimed to have invented the Edge Magazine logo he had been using for his company, Future Publishing won the case on all counts. The USPTO would cancel Edge Games’ trademarks in 2013.
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