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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the store in the kickstarter footage does not even look like an IKEA to me - the floors in the game are much more open and less claustrophobic than an actual IKEA.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ziggygamedev/the-store-...

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The exterior clearly does, but yeah, the interior doesn't seem particularly familiar.

Fortunately, the letter in question lists the element IKEA finds objectionable: "Your game uses a blue and yellow sign with a Scandinavian name on the store, a blue box-like building, yellow vertical striped shirts identical to those worn by IKEA personnel, a gray path on the floor, furniture that looks like IKEA furniture, and product signage that looks like IKEA signage."

No question that the building exterior and signage are based on IKEA. They might actually violate a trademark. The shirts, sure, not sure that's trademarked, though. Some of the furniture designs might be.

The whole thing seems like a pastiche of SCP-3008, even down to the title and enemies, which is literally a horror story about a dimension that’s an infinite IKEA. It’s definitely IKEA.

It’s also fair use, no one in their right mind would ever think this is an IKEA product and it doesn’t compete with IKEA in any way

Edit: Apparently the Kickstarter says “Explore the underground SCP laboratories and build towers to the sky to find a way out”. Gee, wonder what company was directly mentioned in the corresponding SCP story

> It’s also fair use, no one in their right mind would ever think this is an IKEA product and it doesn’t compete with IKEA in any way

Or there are darker truths and IKEA DOES have products that the horror is competing with

The mundane reality is likely just that the game reveals a way to exit the maze, which is considered a trade secret and could hurt IKEA's business.

Fair use doesn't apply to trademarks and patents.

https://www.trademarklawyerfirm.com/what-is-trademark-fair-u...

Yeah, it does. This isn’t a traditional parody on the surface, but IKEA being a labyrinth of horrors can pretty clearly be read as a parody on their unorthodox store design (no one’s making a horror game about being trapped in a Best Buy lmao). The Creative Commons horror story this is ripped off of is officially named “A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA” on the site (although no one uses the names of SCPs), which adds to that.

> (no one’s making a horror game about being trapped in a Best Buy lmao)

I know of at least one horror movie made about a supermarket [0], so it's not unprecedented. The IKEA-like aspect here is less "big store after dark" and more of the seemingly infinite maze, which at this point is pretty much a trademark for the brand...

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[0] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2282989/

is a store layout a trademark?

It's very likely that this would fall under fair use.

The risk for the developers is that they (probably) don't have the money to fight IKEA in court. Thus, placating them is a more reasonable approach, especially considering that IKEA seem to be good sports about it.

Come on, it's an obvious IKEA parody ... but so what, it (should) fall under free-speech protections.

It's rather funny (funny: strange) to me that we live in a day and age when "the look of a store" is a recognizable thing. How did we manage to steer this ship into such strange waters?

How are stores different in this respect than other products/services?

Branding is a thing. Recognizable brands are the essence of trademark. This day and age is not new.

Many businesses have done this intentionally, especially large chains like Walmart and Walgreens, to make it easy for shoppers to enter, find exactly what they're looking for, and complete a transaction quickly and with low friction, so that even when travelling, they are compelled to use them over alternatives.

Why is that strange to you? What would the alternative, "less strange", reality be?

Chain store branding has gotten a lot more consistent and, I dunno, "slick", I guess, since the 90s, excepting a few fast food places that have gone the opposite direction for some reason and toned their branding way down (Pizza Hut, McDonalds). At least in the US.

Like, in 1990 you could imagine a Wal-Mart moving into an old K-Mart's location and not tearing the building down and starting over, and probably not even doing a ton of façade work. Now? Only 3rd-tier sorts of chains go into storefronts without extensive renovation, at least, and the top-tier brands all seem to want to start with an empty slab. You only see the old style in rural small towns that haven't caught up yet (and maybe never will—perhaps there's no way to make a decent ROI on tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra branding in those places). Or, oddly, in places that have really strict building codes for commercial storefronts that forbid breaking from a certain style, so you tend to see the more muted branding in both very-well-off places, and very poor ones, though expressed differently.

stores are owned and operated locally and aren't copied and pasted global monoliths

It’s funny you’re saying that on a site accessible within fractions of a second form pretty much anywhere in the world.

It used to be fun to travel, even locally within the U.S., and see new stores and places you did not have back home. I never thought I would say this, but this Western world is becoming a downright boring place to live.

If they're all selling furniture why do they need to be any different? What's different between the requirements of a low-end furniture store like Ikea in New York and one in San Francisco that would mean there's any sense in running them differently?

> stores are owned and operated locally

You mean franchised. And while perhaps not the dictionary definition, in practice it is the literal definition of a franchise that every instance looks the same as every other one.

I don't thing franchises have to be so boring though, maybe a lot of people aren't old enough to remember... but McDonalds franchises, despite having mostly the same food, used to have the freedom to get a little weird with how the location looked.

Those stores exist too, though.

The UK newsagent WH Smith’s established the look of their stores in 1852. If you have a chain shops with the same owner, it’s hard to imagine why each branch would use a different design.

Would such protections still apply if money is intended to be made? That is clearly the case, since its on Kickstarter.

Parody for money is protected BUT you have to be parodying the thing iirc.

So Weird Al could have made all his songs without permission (but he gets it to be polite) - though he’d still have to pay licensing to use the music iirc.

There’s case law about it. Barbie Girl may be involved. Snoopy vs the Red Baron also.

There's a nerd-famous one involving Penny Arcade using (IIRC) Strawberry Shortcake to parody the style of American McGee's Alice. I think PA ended up caving because it was too hard to defend the use of a character from one owner to parody something about another property entirely. The strip was definitely intended as parody, but including elements from something that wasn't the subject of the parody made it much harder to defend under that exception.

Yep, the famous banned PA comic (you can still find it, of course).

But this response comic was parody of the subject matter, so it is fine: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/04/28/read-it-before...

Maybe. Both cases you mention are songs, not video games. From a modern perspective you would think the laws about intellectual property for video games would be the same as for film and music. I think the long run that will be true. But some of the early precedent has treated video games more like "toys" with less speech protection.

If you are really doing this check with a lawyer who works in the area (admittedly few).

Yeah, and this one is a bit more spicy because the whole point is that you're in a horror IKEA and so the fact that it's clearly an IKEA is part of the "sale value" of the game.

Compare to Carl & Phil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRJEN1pvZ60 - that's clearly a Costco/Sam's Club parody (and they also have FedUPS as a delivery company) but it's not being used to "sell".

It's very complicated and involves trademark AND copyright law, so it could go either way.

Also see Sosumi and BHA ;)

Does it matter if parody is for money? Comedians need to eat too.

It is extremely obvious that this is an IKEA, what are you talking about?

Still, the maze like path, the style of the products, as well as the blue yellow branding make it clear to me that this is happening in an IKEA.

The unicursal path of Ikea would skip an interesting game-play possibility, therefore I guess it is not Ikea-like.

Which game play possibility?

Also, Ikea path isn't actually unicursal, there are shortcuts (famously hard to spot but otherwise accessible for all shoppers).

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