Comments on: Futuremark Gives Lame Excuse for Trying to Trademark “Pwnage”

By: .....

..... — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:58:25 +0000

@William
What makes you think that they are going to trademark it for profit? I mean, I don’t think they are going to charge money from people or companies.

And besides, terms/words such as LOL have already been trademarked.

By: weclock

weclock — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:15:54 +0000

that’s almost as lame as trying to trade mark NSFW

By: William

William — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:20:11 +0000

@Norbit. That’s the thing though. The term “pwnage” has already been used by numerous companies and individuals. They are obviously just trying to trademark a popular term for profit… a term that has already been coined and used by other business ventures.

By: Tarrelond

Tarrelond — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:27:47 +0000

Yes, Norbit, the problem is those are all legit examples. They make sense. Futuremark at this point in time has no legit reason to trademark something that was probably invented by either 4chan or somethingawful.

By: Norbit

Norbit — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:22:14 +0000

@ William

Its makes no difference at all if the company is called the same thing as what they are trademarking so what is your point?

If Amazon wanted to start up a grocers called ‘carrots’ they would be perfectly entitled to trademark that name as a grocers as long as it hadnt been done so already by someone else.

If anyone wants to be angry at this they should also be angry at every other company that has trademarked existing words that they dint invent. I’m pretty sure Microsoft didnt invent the word Windows so I imagine you will be posting a story soon complaining about how they have trademarked that in the field of computing the way Futuremark are going to do with pwnage. Macintosh is a type of coat and they were definitely around before Apple trademarked the word in computing so there’s another target for your ire

By: William

William — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:01:57 +0000

@Norbit: one problem in particular is the fact that this is not their company name. There are also actual companies out there with the name pwnage connected to them. There certainly is a huge difference between the two.. “Amazon” is actually their company name.

By: Norbit

Norbit — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:27:32 +0000

I do not understand how anyone can have a problem with this. Amazon didnt invent the word Amazon but they trademarked it so no one else can use it to sell stuff online. there is absolutely no difference.

By: mojimo

mojimo — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:03:04 +0000

Personally, I will never buy a game with pwnage in, around, or anywhere near the title. It’s bad enough that I have to listen to people say “pownage”, but that a game developer would think that including that in the game title is a good idea tells me they’re pandering to an audience I hope I’m not part of.

By: •__•

•__• — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:42:02 +0000

Or at least used to be so…

By: •__•

•__• — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:38:24 +0000

“# ManOfTeal says:
March 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

As long as this company actually makes a game called “Pwnage” I do not have a problem with the trademark. If they are trademarking “Pwnage” just so some other comapny can’t create a game with that title without paying this comapnay money then that is not right.
”

Yeah, if they tried to prevent other companies from making games with “pwnage” and charged money for it, it would be lame and wrong. But I really don’t understand why they would do something like that. I think that they are preventing others from doing that to them.

OFFTOPIC
Isn’t Futuremark mostly owned by Remedy, the makers of Max Payne (1 and 2), Death Rally and Alan Wake?

By: ManOfTeal

ManOfTeal — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:54:35 +0000

By: •__•

•__• — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:50:47 +0000

Maybe they are making a game or program with “pwnage”.

There are many companies that trademark words/stuff when they see some company is it and then they charge money for it, so that “lame excuse” as you called it seems pretty reasonable to me. It has nothing to do with creating words/terms.