Starcraft Html5 project revived on GitHub without all copyrighted materials

It doesn't matter how the market should behave (I agree with you about free competition), the reality is that Blizzard owns the trademark and there are legal processes surrounding that.

They can compete, just not with the same trademarked name or, as previously, copyrighted materials. I'm not referring to how things should work, rather how they actually work.

That's not how that works. You're welcome to compete by making a different RTS game, but you can't just copy theirs and offer it up for free and then say they should "outcompete" you.

In the world you would like to live in, every product would have over a hundred Chinese knockoffs with the same name, luring patrons away from each other with advertisements featuring big-busted ladies or cute fluffy cartoons, and no one would have any incentive to put effort into making games of sufficient quality that aren't a free-to-play front for milking in-app purchases.

For a preview of such a world, see the App Store and Google Play.

In your world consumers would be unable to tell the difference between the crappy clones and the original and probably give up on all of them.

Blizzard is, rightfully, concerned about consumers being confused and thinking that they are somehow involved in this endeavor.

Lastly, if their scrappy open source game is better than Blizzard's, they shouldn't need Blizzard's assets. Unless of course, it was the Starcraft identity that made it "good" in the first place.

In the world I would like to live in, customers who want to play Starcraft wouldn't have to do a bunch of research to figure out which one is Blizzard's and which one is the pretender.

Some valid points, however:

> Could reasonable person confuse the two? Could reasonable person claim that one is substitute for the other?

If not a "No True Scotsman" argument, that's a personal attack. I am a reasonable pragmatist that is very-much in touch with reality and reality often sucks. If I'm proven wrong; I would be overjoyed. I just really can't see any benefit for an open source project (with no legal resources) taking a risk like this.

Posting to HN and Reddit with "HTML5 Starcraft" in the title is one thing (and conveys the same message), actually including Starcraft in the project name is a completely unnecessary risk. There is evidence to support that statement: Nostalrius and WOW emulation in general. Blizzard went after multiple WOW emulation projects (e.g. MongOS and WGrid) even though they claimed to be "an educational project for MMO servers." MongOS did nothing more than provide a black-box-replicated data set for the WOW client and protocol-level compatibility with WOW (also black-box-replicated): there was no copyright or trademark infringement and they still found themselves in trouble.

Open source has poked this legal wasp nest multiple times and has been stung by that every time. Is there any evidence in support of Blizzard just standing by and letting things slide?

> First, is there a single event in history where multimillion dollar trademark lost the protection that was paid for because there existed open-source hobby project with the same name?

No, because loss of trademarks from non-enforcement was well-established risk before "open source software" was a thing, so no trademark owner that cares fails to police against open source hobby projects with the same name in the same market.

You'll be surprised to learn that StarCraft is played by thousands of players still and Blizzard probably still makes good money selling Starcraft licenses. As StarCraft 2's popularity is diminishing, it looks like at some point SC:BW will again be more popular than SC2.

StarCraft is not like your average abandonware game.