Legal Geek No. 87: Cards Against Humanity turns against counterfeiters

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we look at a recent lawsuit filed by the makers of the Cards Against Humanity game and the incorrect original news stories about the conflict.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp87


News reports broke a couple weeks ago that the company that makes Cards Against Humanity, the party game for terrible people that has been a great selling sensation since 2009, sued a competitor in Missouri federal court for copyright and trademark infringement. The original news stories identified the non-authorized parody expansions sold under the name Crabs Adjust Humidity as the defendant, but it later turned out to be an entirely different company.

The real defendant is Skkye Enterprises, a business in Missouri which is allegedly selling knockoff counterfeit versions of the regular Cards Against Humanity game. This makes more sense than suing the makers of Crabs Adjust Humidity, although it makes the card game case a little less interesting that it would have been otherwise.

Crabs Adjust Humidity came up with their own cards and use their own type font, art styles, and collection of words, so the artistic, copyrightable protectable features covered by CAH's copyrights likely do not apply to those cards. But a pure copy of the same cards and fonts and styles like in these alleged counterfeits from Skkye Enterprises would more clearly be copyright infringement.

On the trademark side, Crabs Adjust Humidity is a clever change because it uses the same acronym initials as the CAH game while being substantially different. That, plus the different packaging with a lot of red coloring along with the traditional game's black and while coloring clearly distinguishes this product in the minds of consumers from CAH. However, the alleged counterfeits of Skkye Enterprises use the exact same packaging and product name in order to compete directly with genuine copies of Cards Against Humanity.

Thus, while CAH may have a good case against these counterfeiters, a similar lawsuit filed against the parody Crabs Adjust Humidity would not likely fare so well. Perhaps it's a good thing those initial news stories were wrong about the defendant in this case!

The Bottom Line is, when competing with or building on popular products or games, you need to be extra careful to avoid IP infringement. Even defending against such a lawsuit can make your business efforts not worth the fuss, if you do it wrong.

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