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| Bethesda wants to punch this guy in the junk. |
Markus "Notch" Persson, Minecraft dev, is under fire from Bethesda because his company's new game, Scrolls, bears resemblance to Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. Not the games themselves. Just the word scrolls. Bethesda is suing Nizzotch over the word scrolls.
Scrolls.
If you asked a lawyer about this situation then they'd tell you that only a retard would defend the word scrolls as a piece of creative property, but by targeting Notch Bethesda will acquire some legal history that they can point at when their Elder Scrolls games actually come under attack. Basically, they want to be able to say, "Look, judge! We fucked Notch in the ass and all he did was use the word scrolls! We're serious motherfuckers over here."
Bethesda's lawyers are, up front, asking for a bunch of money before the legal dispute even gets under way. To a lawyer I'm sure this makes perfect sense, but to everyone else it just sounds like Bethesda is acting like a bunch of dicks to a guy that really doesn't deserve it (Not that I'm cancelling my pre-order of Skyrim or anything crazy like that).
If this were any other indie developer then that dev/team would simply have to close up shop before an army of lawyers came to their house and killed their dog, but Notch is the most successful indie dev on the fucking planet. He's got money to burn. He's also a little eccentric...
Demanding a Game of Thrones-style Trial by Combat, Notch has offered to pit his three best warriors against Bethesda's three best warriors in a game of Quake 3. If Notch wins, the lawsuit goes away. If Bethesda wins, Notch has to change the name of his game from Scrolls to something else.
I think he's handling this about as seriously as it deserves to be handled.
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