BEWARE

(Nail) #1

Just a heads up to anyone with a website that has the names:
Enemy Territory
Enemy Territory:Quake Wars
Quake Wars
Wolfenstein

Our wonderful freinds at Activision have shown how they treat customer loyalty. After over 3 years of maintaining one of the largest ET Resource sites in the world at www.enemy-territory.com and hosting
2,535,390 downloads of Win and Linux ET files, not counting maps, tools etc, and initially having Edward Stern (ID software) and Caryl Law (Activision) both telling us that they like the site and wishing us luck, we got this e-mail:

Dear Mr. Martin:

I am the Online Manager for Activision Publishing, Inc. Our company publishes and distributes the successful WOLFENSTEIN: ENEMY TERRITORY™ game and the new ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS™ game, both of which were developed by id Software. Note that ENEMY TERRITORY® is a registered trademark and WOLFENSTEIN: ENEMY TERRITORY™ and ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS™ are trademarks of id Software, licensed to Activision.

It is our understanding that you have registered the domain name enemy-territory.com and are using it in connection with a website devoted to our games. Our company and id appreciate greatly your interest in the games and your efforts in creating and maintaining the site. It is loyal fans such as you who make our efforts in this field worthwhile.

I am writing to explore the possibility of purchasing the enemy-territory.com domain name on behalf of Activision. In exchange for the transfer of the domain name, our company would be willing to pay $250 to you and provide a copy of any one of the published Activision games. Of course, you would be free to continue to operate your site, but would have to use another URL.

In view of the fact that your domain name includes id Software trademarks and thus could be transferred without charge, I believe that this is a very fair offer. If you agree, please contact me so that we can work out the details of the transfer. I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to receiving your reply.

Sincerely yours,

John Horniblow
Online Manager
Activision Publishing, Inc.

so, it seems while ET was free, it was ok for us to promote their game for free for them and help make the game what it was, now that et:qw will be a smash commercial success our contributions have been deemed irrelevant and we can have our domain name just taken away from us essentially killing our website, We have almost 400,000 members who associate our domain name with our site.

now delays wouldn’t stop me from buying the game, but this kind of heavy handedness certainly will, and could also have me advising our members by mass mail to boycott Activision games.

Hopefully this won’t get deleted immediately, but I advise anybody else with a site that uses ANY of the names to expect an e-mail from the Activision bean counters wanting to use all the work and goodwill you’ve developed without any effort on their part.

All this crap really pisses me off, they should remember it’s the community that made ET the game it is and therefore helped develop the fanatic devotion to the gameplay aspect that has been shown in these forums

sorry if this is too off topic for here, but I needed to rant IN the community

/rant

(nUllSkillZ) #2

Strange that they now after around 4 years remember their TM’s.

If you say no you will loose the address. But have fought.
If you say yes you will loose the address. But will receive 250$ (and one game for free as far as I get this).

May be letter of the community could help fighting.

Hard decision.

(carnage) #3

they can take any domain name that contain tradmarks of there company? but domain names are bought and paid for, surely they dont have the right to take it from you. and isnt the interent a global think so no countly is responsable for enforcing lawas on it? i cant see how they can do this. anyone offer a better explanation to these things

one thing im starting to realsise about modern games. puplishers suck. EA, activision now… its a shame game studios just cant afford to make a game and distribute it privatly giving them control over the game and alloing original and new fun ideas to come though. and finaly allow the studios the take all the profits they desere from it

/joins rant

(mortis) #4

Hmmm. I wonder what they’ll make of my domain…quakewarsterritory.com…

Not that it’s SD’s fault that Activision’s lawyers have gotten pissy. Big companies always get pissy when they smell the scent of money in the water…

Shame on them for going after fan sites! Thanks for the publicity and free support for our product, but we’re going to shut you down! Somebody should point them to the fansite kit provided by SD at the Enemy Territory official site. Evidently, you can use the kit, but cannot use any trademarked names.

“Umm. Welcome to ClassBasedFirstPersonShooter dot com. We have maps and patches for a certain game made by a certain company. This game is the successor to another game. We’re not sure how you found our site, since we can’t use any trademarked names, but I guess you’re just lucky.”

“The first thing we do,” said the character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, is “kill all the lawyers.”

(Bravo) #5

Looks like a very polite letter, but the underlying threat is there for all to see.

I don’t go on et.com any more but still wish it great success as I had plenty of fun there in the past.

(nUllSkillZ) #6

I think the rights of the country where the domain is registered are in force.
And also not sure about trademarks.
So another alternative would be to talk to a lawyer.

Edit:

Just came to my mind:
In german “Gewohnheitsrecht”.
Found customary / common / prescriptive / established right.

(mortis) #7

It is polite, but it still is a “you’ll be giving it to us one way or the other” message. Do they really need to have that URL? I understand that they are worried about people mixing up www.enemyterritory.com with www.enemy-territory.com but I don’t see a problem so long as enemy-territory clearly marks itself as a not for profit fansite with a clear link to the official site. It seems to me that Activision wants to cash in on people who visit the current URL and forward them to their domain.

(Salteh) #8

That’s mean :frowning:
“Edward Stern” Is bongoboy btw :moo:.

(kamikazee) #9

Not to say their domain is not Linux compatible because of Flash 8, whilst we’re ranting anyway.

(carnage) #10

from what i have been able to gather from reading versious tech law sites that the main problem you would have is that the product on your website is easily confuesd for the product they are wanting to sell. however you are not selling any product

also all the wals seem to apply nationwide accross america. if your url is not registerd in america i dont see what they can do about it

sadly as the little guy they can probably make it so expensive to fight agasint them that it would be imposible to stop them

also having run the site and helped the comunity for free perhaps $250 is a nice little reward for acts of kindness and selflessness to give something to the comunity. even if its not offered in this way im sure many people will see it like this. also if you get a new URL and post it on the main page for as long as posible before the site is changed you can probably save most of the regualr visitors and a new url wont effect vistors coming from search engines looking for specific help

(Hakuryu) #11

That sucks :frowning:

It does occur to me however, that they actually do not have your name ‘enemy-territory’ trademarked. They own ‘enemy territory’. This is an important distinction that I bet a good lawyer could exploit.

They do own and operate www.enemyterritory.com, which is not www.enemy-territory.com. Just because it is more similar than ‘PlanetQuake’ and ‘Quake’ sites, does not make it the same.

If you can afford a good attorney, I’d fight them, or at least make them pay for your trouble. You worked that URL into a popular destination; if the traffic is high then I’d say they owe you alot more than $250. How many advertising dollars do they spend a year to get X traffic to a site?

(mortis) #12

As I recall, the legal threshhold for a different name is at least 50% different. Adding a hyphen would not meet that. My domain is a “maybe”…the name is not ordinarily written QuakeWarsTerritory. I actually chose the name when we closed our BSD Territory site, so I picked a name that seemed like it would be topical for the next few years. I suppose I could have gone for www.qwt.com … but no, some stupid water company has that!

(Etnies) #13

if you take out the trademarked pictures etc, then they cant do anything about it can they? i wouldnt give up just like that either, and theres always the setting up a paypal fund if you do deciede to fight

(nUllSkillZ) #14

Activision has branch offices in several countries.

Edit:

I’ve just found a side covering german rights and domains.
One of their no’s:
[

keine Marken, keine Namen von Unternehmen

](http://www.domain-recht.de/recht/regel1.php)
Translated:
“no trademarks, no names of companies”

(Nail) #15

well, I can mass e-mail our 389,398 members asking for an e-mail campaign to keep our domain name, but I’m thinking, do I really want to keep supporting this company ? I guess this also means we lose our server name as well, son of a bitch this is pissing me off.

(Wils) #16

Thread noted, will inquire tomorrow.

(btw, as Salteh points out, Ed is from SD, not id).

(senator) #17

What I suggest is not to fight Activision (they have the better lawyers) but try to reach an agreement with them. What I would reply is an offer to create a new intro site thats opened whenever somebody just enters the URL, which explains that this is a fan site and not the official game site, and offers 2 clearly distinct path to proceed, one to the official game site and one to your current main page.

That way everybody who accidently opened your page will immediately realize his error and be forwarded to the real official site, which is exactly what Activision wants.

That should make both sides happy, it’s worth a try I would say. Just try to be polite, harsh words wont help you :slight_smile:

(Nail) #18

sorry, my mistake

(RosOne) #19

And that is exactly what happens. People promote games for free, during their free time, only because they love the game. For years they help making it popular, build communities with custom maps, mods, leagues, tournaments, manage forums, wallpapers and any other fan made stuff you can think of. The positive influence from fan sites on a game are enormous. A game will never get popular if there are no fan sites with fan made material. Fan sites help publisher to get more money - a lot more money. But why do it? So you get a big fat f@#k off sucker.

Do you get exclusive interviews? Sure, if you’re GameSpy. Do you get free stuff? A lousy T-Shirt? A god damn sticker which you can put on your back? Hell no dude, that’d like 13 cents. Publisher can’t afford such gifts these days. Maybe a god damn “Thank You”? Nope, but give us your domain for lousy $250. Damn losers

Ok, got a little of topic… Register a company named enemy-territory which has no relation to computers.

(SCDS_reyalP) #20

It’s worth remembering that trademark holders who do not defend their trademark are at risk of losing it.