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Comment by boredpudding | Hacker News Reader

Yeah sorry man, that's clearly IKEA so it's obvious they had to act on it. Can't sell IKEA-branded games without their permission. Even on their Steam trailer, the first second is clearly IKEA. Just changing the name is not enough. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1593010/The_Store_is_Clos...

Sometimes it's not that deep. Sometimes the cute little indie dev just made a mistake.

The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.

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No reasonable person would have been confused into thinking it was an official IKEA game; IANAL, but it seems unlikely to me that IKEA would have ultimately prevailed in court, though a simple change to the color of the logo would probably have been helpful to the devs of the game.

It's a direct ripoff of https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008, a popular sci-fi horror story set in an IKEA. At the time the game was also using IKEA's brand colors.

The game description on Steam even explicitly mentions "SCP Foundation", which the creator also doesn't have the rights to use unless the whole game is Creative Commons-licensed.

IANAL either, but could this be a trademark issue? My understanding is that if you don’t defend your trademarks you risk legally losing them.

You can only defend your trademark with respect to product categories that you actually market. Unless IKEA were in the business of selling parody video games, their trademark doesn't apply.

Wait... is that why IKEA just put out a parody video game?

The game featured a store and stuff in it, that's a product category IKEA markets.

If the name of an unrelated game was IKEA as some clever acronym or such and it was unrelated to stores, that would be a different trademark convo.

The game is not itself a store or advertising a real store. It is an entirely different product category. Parody is still legal and allowed as fair use, the likeness is the point. This is hardly the most egregious example that I have seen.

Ultimately, these matters would likely be decided in court. IANAL either but it seems like the game maker would have a strong case. Among the things IKEA would have to prove is actual harm and confusion, who would seriously argue that? That doesn't mean IKEA couldn't make it impossible to fight with their unlimited legal resources, I can understand not wanting to spend a chunk of your life on that.

Two things can be true at once: this is the most creative marketing in recent memory and genuinely funny, and IKEA destroyed someone's work simply because they can.

You can also defend it against tarnishment. They can argue that IKEA appearing in a violent video game has negative associations with their trademarks.

IKEA has made video games for a long time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/447270/IKEA_VR_Experience...

Unethical IP lawyers spew that nonsense all the time. Failing to enforce your trademark against a tiny alleged infringer has no effect on your trademark rights at all.

This is false, however this is not seem like a case where trademark is being infringed. If someone else opens a store called Ikea they obviously have to shut it down.

Yeah, that seems like the type of thing that should at least in theory be fair use.

That's not how trademark works.

If you don't defend your mark, you lose it.

IKEA has a trademark on STYR?

Did you look at the screenshots?

IKEA has a trade dress and the game matches their color scheme and font exactly. The building is clearly an IKEA with the exact same branding, just different four letter name.

That would apply to like a competitor, right? Another store that copies their motif to fool customers.

Has a court enforced trade dress with a mock version of a store within a game?

Would a reasonable person, seeing completely different letters actually think IKEA is sponsoring the game?

I would give IKEA almost a 0% chance of winning that case if both sides had equally sized pocketbooks. (see E.S.S. Entertainment v. Rock Star Videos (2008))

Fair use is not how trademarks work? Why does the International Trademark Association seem to think it is then? https://www.inta.org/fact-sheets/fair-use-of-trademarks-inte...

Depending of the court, if you don't protect your trademarks you can lose them.

Law is rarely remotely reasonable, just because you (or society) think a certain way, does not mean law does.

Society however determines how we respond when a company abuses a law. Just because suing indie developers may be the best action for IKEA to protect their trademarks does not mean we should let it be the best action for them overall.

Do you know what parody is?

Trademarks are lost when they are not defended. That is entirely separate from fair use in copyright law.

This explains why Apple has sued The Onion a dozen or so times for all the parodies that infringed on trademarks belonging to the corporation.

https://theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-lapt...

https://theonion.com/new-ipad-offers-3-months-of-something-c...

Just waiting for The Coca Cola company to sue Bethesda for having Nuka Cola.

Why? There are a lot of colas around the world.

Whom they often sue. 100% they would would consider the logo/branding/bottle infringing if they were a competing product.

Sue for using “cola” in the product name? Citation most definitely needed.

Is that what I said?

Fallout 4 parodies the potential legal issue itself in one of its loading screens:

Nuka-Cola's signature rocket-shaped bottle replaced the traditional curved bottle when a rival corporation successfully sued for patent infringement. Fortunately, the public saw the new bottle as an improvement and Nuka-Cola's sales increased.

They’ll probably want to go after Jones Soda first. :eyeroll:

https://www.amazon.com/Jones-Soda-Fallout-Nuka-Cola-Flavored...

Trademark is about preventing someone's brand for being confused for another. Unless someone was confusing this for being an official IKEA product I'm not sure why it would be in the ballpark of trademark.

There is also trade dress of course but that isn't really related.

This is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.”

Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.

IANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch. That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.

A bit of a tangent to Weird Al, who often is said to not need the permission of the original artist because his songs are parodies, usually isn't commenting on the actual content of the original song but instead takes the lyrics and gives them a different theme. 'Smells like Nirvana' is one of the few songs he does that actually does directly parody the original. His videos are far more parody than the songs themselves. Makes me wonder where the legal line actually is drawn and if asking permission is actually because it would be too risky not to.

(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song.

IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.

There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise#Coolio's_respon...

My understanding is that a parody has to actually parody the original work. There's a distinction between "parodying" and "using the songwriting with different lyrics". You see a lot of people doing riffs on "What a Wonderful World" and getting shut down by the Louis Armstrong estate, e.g.

No, tradmarks can be parodied too. It's a first amendment protection, and extremely common in movies, TV and video games.

If the developer worked with a lawyer they could've gotten any suit by IKEA (this wasn't a suit yet, just a cease and desist letter) quickly dismissed.

> It's a first amendment protection

FWIW: Ziggy, the developer, is based in the UK.

Oh, I must have missed that

In that case yeah, it certainly depends on what the local laws say. I think in the UK parody protection applies to copyright but not trademarks.

Always been curious - what are some examples of trademarks being lost due to not being defended?

There's lots and lots of them. Have you ridden an escalator® lately?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Very interesting link. I am now confused and intrigued that the trademark for "heroin" is listed as being revoked as part of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.

Part VIII, Annex VI on reparations: Germany was forced to renounce trademark rights on pharmaceutical and chemical products in favor of the Allied powers, so Bayer's Aspirin and Heroin were included.

Though that is not the type of abandonment that IKEA is worried about in this case. In fact it isn't really clear what form of trademark abandonment IKEA would have to be concerned about for this action to be justified. IANAL but IKEA is definitely not worried about the trademark being ruled abandoned due to non-use, procedural issues or naked licensing; they can easily prove the mark(s) are in active use, and the other two are not related to trademark enforcement.

Again, IANAL but we do need to stop spreading FUD about what trademarks entail. Trademarks are meant to protect a brand from being diluted or confused, not to police the world of all parody or reference to some thing. In fact, if the store in the game wasn't even called an IKEA, I am really curious what "trademark" they felt it violated, but unfortunately not curious enough to find out.

P.S.: a better example of a trademark that fell to non-use would be "Twitter". However I personally dunno if there is a trademark that fell specifically because they didn't bully enough people who tried to use their trademark in ways that wouldn't be confused with their brand. That seems to be a made-up invention by corporate lawyers that people just accept at face value. If it really worked this way, the mark "JavaScript" should've fallen a long time ago.

That's mentioned in the article:

> Further, there’s at least the possibility on the part of the developer to claim that such usage is a “parody,” with parody and satire protected at the highest levels of American law through the application of First Amendment freedom of speech rights. However, courts will often require actual commentary to be made in order to extend such protections. In that way, a store name like “I CAN’T A” (or something far more clever) has a greater chance of succeeding than simply using a play on the word “store” in Scandinavian.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks

According to the article, Starbucks chose not to sue in that case.

I dunno, I've read a novel that was set in a store that was very clearly meant to be IKEA (https://www.amazon.com/Horrorstor-Grady-Hendrix/dp/159474526...) but was also very clearly not officially IKEA. Where do you draw the line?

> The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.

The game is in very active development. The most recent alpha was published just four days ago. [0]

[0]: https://steamdb.info/app/1845400/

Kind of reminds me of a college classmate back in the 80s made a Hypercard game which he had called Escape from Harvey Mudd but which the college asked (maybe demanded?) that it be renamed as it started to get distribution so the more commonly seen version was called Escape from Grid Tech. I would guess that there might have been some reputational concerns as that classmate was one of the people who dropped out of Mudd during my time there (the late 80s cohorts had a lot of people, myself included, who had wavered between humanities and sciences and after exposure to life in the sciences decided to opt for the humanities instead—most of us ended up doing programming for a living having no marketable skills post-college. The one person from my freshman year suite who actually finished his degree at Mudd went on to become a music professor).

Did not expect to see Mudd mentioned in the comment section on HN for an IKEA Skyrim mod... Not really surprised the admin was like that given the name, but I hope things worked out well for y'all.

Is IKEA the only furniture store in the world? I do not see any IKEA branding in the trailer.

Trade dress is protected in addition to the actual brand marks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress

IKEA is the only furniture store with a four-letter name in that same typeface in yellow on a blue building even though it is called 'STYR' here. It is the only furniture store using that uniform, also blue-yellow, for its personnel. The game maker clearly used IKEA as an inspiration but forgot that 'inspiration' is not the same as 'duplication'. They could have made the building red, used a serif typeface and a 7-character name, dressed their 'personnel' in red-green uniforms, etc. and IKEA would not have bothered them. Now, they did, and right they were.

The factory builder game Captain of Industry has a building you can add on to a settlement which sells household goods and furniture to the population. It's a blue building with yellow trim and a big sign on the front that says IDEA. I wonder if this is just small potatoes enough of a parody that IKEA wouldn't care about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/captain_of_industry/comments/1vtbz8...

They may just not have noticed it. Are there other brands shown in that way in the same game? That would probably also make it a less of an issue.

I've never been in an IKEA but it looks like Backrooms to me

did Backrooms also infringe on IKEA or maybe every furniture store has the same concept

Some of the early backrooms lore and levels were based on noclipping in furniture stores or even IKEA directly since it was all fan made stuff not caring about the legal ramifications.

I tried to find a link but it’s impossible now that backrooms is a popular IP

And having been in an empty IKEA, it definitely had that liminal feel

>The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.

Yeah that’s crazy I wonder why

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