Meh, crayons let you violate Marvel copyright. CoH terms of use specifically forbid users from copyright infringment and they do delete all charachters found to be in breach. If the claws power set had them springing from the fingertips they'd just trot out Lady Deathstrike in order to persecute them. Obviously this law suit has nothing to do with the Marvel MMO currently in development, oh no.
I think the bigest stumbling block for NCSoft is that the terms of use state that charachters created using CoH are the property of NCSoft. I'm sure this has a lot of impact for stuff like trademarks and their renewal.
In fairness, there's nothing that says there has to be a "claws" power, or that the claws have to be a foot long. Or that there have to be three of them and they have to go "snikt".
I think Tycho said it best. "it's difficult to be honest and still say that (at the very least) the Claw and Spine powers don't draw liberally from Marvel characters. ... I'm not trying to suggest that they aren't dicks. But Cryptic could have covered their asses to a much greater degree, protected more of the tender surface area. Would Marvel have come after them anyway? Wouldn't surprise me. But at least we could defend City of Heroes without omitting inconvenient facts and making liars of ourselves."
Marvel don't own the copyrights to actual powers, though possibly "Snikt" may be a trademark or something. Marvel's complaint is that you can create characters that look like the Hulk, which is specifically mentiond in the deposition, and other copyrighted characters. The absence of claws wouldn't change one thing about the case, you can still make an invulnerable super strong green chap in purple jeans and call him the Bulk and that's what's at the core of Marvel's complaint as well as the use of terms like "mutant powers".
Sure, you can point to the fact that there are other large people (even other large green people) in comics - the Thing, Despero, Mongol, the Savage Dragon. But I have always thought the "claws" power was asking for trouble.
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kingandy
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 09:43 am (UTC)I think the bigest stumbling block for NCSoft is that the terms of use state that charachters created using CoH are the property of NCSoft. I'm sure this has a lot of impact for stuff like trademarks and their renewal.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 12:06 pm (UTC)I think Tycho said it best. "it's difficult to be honest and still say that (at the very least) the Claw and Spine powers don't draw liberally from Marvel characters. ... I'm not trying to suggest that they aren't dicks. But Cryptic could have covered their asses to a much greater degree, protected more of the tender surface area. Would Marvel have come after them anyway? Wouldn't surprise me. But at least we could defend City of Heroes without omitting inconvenient facts and making liars of ourselves."
no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 12:38 pm (UTC)I have no doubt that Marvel will win against the dirty slanty eyed Korean devils that are stealing the food out of the mouths of honest Americans.