Legal Geek No. 118: Dominion and Call of Duty in the Legal Crosshairs

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we update you on a couple of interesting legal cases dealing with popular games, the Dominion tabletop game and the Call of Duty series of video games.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp118

We start with Rio Grande Games, makers of Dominion, which all but created the deck building genre so popular in tabletop games the past 10 years.  Rio Grande has recently sued a handful of Amazon sellers for allegedly selling counterfeit copies of this game Dominion.

Rio Grande did a bit of their own discovery work, anonymously ordering Dominion from these sources and then investigating whether the copies of the game received were genuine.  They were not.  For example, the knockoffs use significantly lower quality card stock, and a plastic insert much flimsier than the one included with original boxes of Dominion.

With all of the artwork and game name and logos copied, this lawsuit has plenty of claims including trade dress infringement and copyright infringement.  An injunction seems likely in this circumstance, but it raises the question of will other fraudulent Amazon sellers pop up then, to take their place.  It's a constant struggle for some manufacturers and fields, but perhaps not as prevalent in the board game industry.  Thus, Rio Grande may be developing the cutting edge of what to do in these types of knockoff situations.

Unlike Rio Grande, who is suing others to protect their marketplace, Activision Blizzard, the makers of Call of Duty, is the target of a lawsuit filed this week for what they allegedly do with this series of games.  AM General, the makers of military Humvee vehicles, is suing Activision for improper use of trademarks associated with this vehicles.  AM General argues that humvees being prominently displayed in the video games and ancillary products like toys is Activision taking advantage of someone else's intellectual property.

This appears to be a bit of a cash grab by AM General, as the demands here are more for damages than for an injunction.  The legal theory here for significant damages relies on a claim that the wild popularity and sales success of Call of Duty comes only at the expense of AM General and the consumers who are duped into believing these companies are aligned or licensing the trademarks to one another.  That seems like it will be very difficult to prove, but perhaps a small amount of damages is warranted for unlicensed use of vehicle designs in these games.

The Bottom Line is, when gaming companies are successful and lead their marketplaces by making lots of sales and money, knockoffs or those with potential legal claims will always come out of the woodwork to try and claim a piece of the pie.  In those circumstances, courts serve an important purpose in making sure everyone plays fair in the free market.  It will be interesting to see what other game companies get entrenched in conflicts in the coming months, and if they are similar to these two.

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