Legal Geek No. 16: Evaluating the Copyright and Trade Dress Claims in Hex vs. Magic Litigation Battle

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we finish our review of the legal battle brewing between Wizards of the Coast and Cryptozoic by looking at the merits of Wizards' copyright and trade dress claims.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp16

The trade dress claimed by Wizards is the overall product appearance of Magic and its computer counterparts, alleged to include the packaging and 15-card contents of booster packs, the overall visual aspects of the cards, and the like. However, Wizards likely shot this claim in the foot by admitting all of this alleged trade dress has some functionality.

Functional elements are not protectable trade dress under the Lanham Act, so this trade dress claim is likely dead on arrival. I expect the trade dress claim to be decided in favor of Hex on initial summary judgment.

Turning to copyright, Wizards has set forth a compelling story of all the elements of Magic that Hex has allegedly copied. These copied aspects include the major types of cards, ability names on creatures, the same five colors of cards, a list of functionally identical cards, the background game appearance on a computer display, the same general rules of deck construction and combat during play, and the use of tapping cards to show use.

The vast majority of these appear to be the underlying facts or ideas that are not protectable creative expressions under copyright law. Many knockoff video games were able to escape copyright infringement over the last two decades on similar grounds, but some courts (including one involving a Tetris clone in 2012) have recently taken to applying copyright infringement where the amount of total elements copied is significant and overwhelming. Based on Wizards' complaint, that could very well be the case here.

So the copyright claim may come down to whether the judge or jury is sympathetic to the idea that knocking off most of the major aspects of a computer game is wrong. That's incredibly hard to predict, so the copyright claim will be the most interesting going forward.

Bottom Line: Wizards will likely prevail on the patent claim but will lose on the trade dress claim, which means the unpredictable copyright claim will determine whether Hex will be allowed to continue in this market for the long term. It will be certainly fun to see how this plays out in court between two game company titans.

Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.