Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review a couple more recent branding battles regarding well-known tabletop games, with reviews of ongoing cases and issues involving Monopoly and Cards Against Humanity.
We covered Hasbro last week in their copyright win over The Game of Life, and this week the gaming giant filed a trademark opposition to try and protect perhaps the most iconic brand of gaming, Monopoly. A Croatian company is trying to register Drinkopoly as a U.S. trademark, and it has been allowed by the U.S. trademark office. But as we've covered before, allowed applications publish for a few weeks to give the public and other rights holders a chance to object before a trademark finalizes into a registration. That's what Hasbro did here, consistent with similar challenges filed in the last 2 years against other applications like Monopoly Movement, Monopoly Enterprises, Slotopoly, among others.
Hasbro is relying on its dominant market position to claim that despite the differences in the name, the Drinkopoly brand would lead to consumer confusion about the source of goods for that game. Hasbro can throw some amazing stats up there, like 220 million sets of the game being sold since 1934, and the marks generating over $3 billion dollars in sales of products in the last decade. Makes sense why they would spend a little cash being proactive to try and keep others out of the "opoly" brand field. Hasbro has a good success rate in these trademark oppositions, but we'll keep our eyes on this challenge to see where it goes.
Our second subject this week is the party game Cards Against Humanity, whose owners have become much more willing to challenge other competitors in court or at the trademark office in recent years. One such challenge wrapped up this week when the Appeal Board at the Trademark Office decided that Cards Against Humanity had a legitimate claim to oppose and stop the registration of a game expansion called Crabs Adjust Humidity.
The Crabs expansion pack was released by Vampire Squid Cards three years after CAH came on the market, and the name and stylings were chosen as an absurdist rhyme of the original Cards Against Humanity. Vampire Squid was extremely careful to try and avoid IP infringement here, and indeed, Cards Against Humanity initially sent e-mails granting some level of approval for Vampire Squid to sell the Crabs pack. However, these agreements began to break when CAH objected to Vampire Squid selling the Crabs expansion pack at Target in 2015, and then this opposition to a trademark application filed the same year.
The appeal judge ruled that while the two game names have very different literal connotations, the similarities in appearance, pronunciation, and overall commercial impression was too much to allow Crabs Adjust Humidity to co-exist over Cards Against Humanity objections. Furthermore, although you can lose the right to object to another trademark by acquiescing to it in the field, the court interesting ruled that the early-stage agreements to let Crabs Adjust Humidity be used in some markets was not an effective legal acquiescence to registering the same trademark. This case may set a precedent that gets cited in many other contexts where some initial approval of a competitor happens before a pull back occurs, so Crabs for everyone in future trademark cases!
So Cards Against Humanity wins again, just like they did when pulling another competitor Humanity Hates Trump off the Kickstarter fundraising platform. Speaking of Kickstarter challengers to CAH, another knockoff-type adult card game called The Offensive Adult Party Game from a company called The Dragon's Tomb launched this week on the platform. The game appears to use the same font and black and white card styles as CAH, which may be a bridge too far for a fair use defense. I'd expect another Kickstarter takedown from Cards Against Humanity here, and if it does happen, it will be interesting to see if CAH gets sued by the company they take down once again, claiming such actions are improper.
The Bottom Line is, the most popular tabletop games are always at risk of competitors carving out places in the market with similar sound names or trade dress. It is important for brand owners of valuable brands to protect and defend their turf, and that's why these gaming giants Hasbro and Cards Against Humanity will continue to fill this segment's coffers with interesting news stories to cover. Until next time, enjoy the gaming!
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