Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we update what happened with the Magic/Hex IP lawsuit covered by a three-week series of this segment in 2014, and then look at the unique legal challenges major presidential candidates are facing in this crazy 2016 circus show of a campaign.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp65
Back in 2014, two of our favorite nerdy game companies went to court as Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: the Gathering, sued Cryptozoic for alleged patent, copyright, and trade dress infringement based on the then-new online card game Hex. Unfortunately for legal geeks wanting to see all this intellectual property argument play out, the two companies reached a settlement a few weeks ago to end the conflict.
The terms are undisclosed publicly, as is typical, but Cryptozoic did accept a license of Wizards' intellectual property, so Hex clearly had to pay up some money to keep Hex alive and free of legal interference from the owners of Magic. Perhaps Wizards accepted a smaller royalty payment than normal in the face of perhaps losing on the all-important copyright claim.
The Bottom Line is that consumers win in this circumstance, as both companies avoid protracted and costly IP litigation that drain resources from these projects, while both companies receive some payment for the creative works that have been combined to make Hex.
Turning to a different kind of magic in the presidential campaign, the 2016 field has largely been narrowed to five viable candidates. What makes this campaign even more interesting than usual is not the rising tide of outsiders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but the legal challenges that may derail the more traditional front running candidates.
One of these is the potential e-mail confidentiality scandal involving Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. The other is the challenge to whether Ted Cruz is a "natural born citizen" eligible to run for president as a result of being born in Canada, and that is an interesting legal question worth discussion here.
There are three requirements to be president as set forth in the Constitution: be at least 35 years old, be a resident for 14 consecutive years, and be a "natural born citizen." That last term is not explicitly defined in the Constitution, nor has it been interpreted by the Supreme Court in the last 240 years. So after Donald Trump pointed out this potential problem for Cruz, who was born in Canada to a U.S. citizen mother and a Cuban citizen father, lawsuits were filed by several citizens in different states and these challenges to Cruz's eligibility are ongoing.
So how does this play out? Legal scholars believe Cruz likely wins these lawsuits because the British used "natural born" at the time the Constitution was written to mean all people subject to the crown, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 determined that any children of a mother OR father who is a citizen of the US is also a citizen, regardless of place of birth. Even though that Act is no longer in force, the closeness in time of that Act and the Constitution provides strong evidence that this is what the framers and lawmakers intended, for people like Cruz to be eligible.
The Bottom Line is, this is an unresolved question left open for nearly two and a half centuries, so it's a fair challenge to Cruz or anyone other similarly-situated candidates. It will be good to hopefully find final resolution for the future, even though it adds to the reality TV circus show this campaign has become.
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