Warner Bros. being sued over Nyan Cat and Keyboard cat theft

[MoogleViper]

And the award for most succint title of the years goes to...

 

Warner Bros is being sued for the alleged unauthorised use of two cats that have achieved internet fame.

 

Clips of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat have each spurred tens of millions of views since appearing online in 2011 and 2007 respectively.

 

The complaint alleged that the cats were used without permission in Scribblenauts, a series of games on the Nintendo DS and other platforms.

 

Neither Warner Bros or 5th Cell, the game's developer, have commented.

 

Court documents alleged that Warner Bros and 5th Cell "knowingly and intentionally infringed" both claimant's ownership rights.

 

"Compounding their infringements," court papers said, "defendants have used 'Nyan Cat' and 'Keyboard Cat', even identifying them by name, to promote and market their games, all without plaintiffs' permission and without any compensation to plaintiffs."

 

Japanese pop

The Keyboard Cat was first partially created in 1984 by Charles Schmidt, who filmed his cat Fatso "playing" a electric keyboard.

 

More than two decades later it was put to music and uploaded to YouTube in a clip called "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat" - internet users would often use Keyboard Cat as way of mocking subjects in videos.

 

Nyan Cat, designed by Christopher Torres, is described in court documents as "a character with a cat's face and a body resembling a horizontal breakfast bar with pink frosting sprinkled with light red dots, flies across the screen, leaving a stream of exhaust in the form of a bright rainbow in its wake".

 

A YouTube video combining the cat animation with a Japanese pop song was the fifth most-viewed YouTube clip in 2011.

 

Both Mr Torres and Mr Schmidt own copyrights and trademarks of the characters.

 

They have called for an injunction preventing the sale of Scribblenauts until the matter has been resolved.

 

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22397446

 

 

What do you guys think?

 

Personally, I don't like this culture of suing over everything. However, you can bet that if those guys had created a game featuring a WB character/trademark, their very expensive lawyers would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

I'm so torn over stuff like this; on one hand I understand the need to protect your ideas and work from outright being stolen, but on the other hand the point of it all is to encourage creativity, and oftentimes these things do nothing but strangle it.

[Daft]

You can't own a meme, that's what makes it a meme. These people can go suck a fuck and take their fucking cats with them. They are freeloading detritus.

[Cube]

Can you imagine the outrage if CBS tried to sue one of the meme generator companies for using (and making money of) the "angry Picard" meme?

[MoogleViper]

Yet Warner Bros. let people upload their videos onto youtube?

[Guy]

Personally, I don't like this culture of suing over everything. However, you can bet that if those guys had created a game featuring a WB character/trademark, their very expensive lawyers would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

 

Sums up my feelings perfectly.

 

"I have no issues with Nyan Cat being enjoyed by millions of fans as a meme, and I have never tried to prevent people from making creative uses of it that contribute artistically and are not for profit," Torres said. "But this is a commercial use, and these companies themselves are protectors of their own intellectual property."

 

Nice quote there from Chris Torres. If these guys are actually able to own copyright to these characters, they have every right to some acknowledgement or financial return for commercial use without their consent. Douche move or not, that's kind of how the world works.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Guy

[Cube]

are not for profit

 

So he plans on suing everyone on YouTube who has a Nyan Cat video with adverts enabled?

 

I suppose it does suggest something odd when the game didn't try to include other characters - not even ones owned by Warner Bros.

 

Personally, I would class hidden stuff in Scribblenauts as "humour" and "parody", but that's something that the gaming industry seems terrified of trying, while you see it all the time in film and TV.

[Serebii]

I do wonder if this is why Europe has yet to get the game

Edited May 4, 2013 by Serebii

[Guy]

So he plans on suing everyone on YouTube who has a Nyan Cat video with adverts enabled?

 

I think that's a fair point and I'm not sure I'm qualified to get into the specifics of how that would work. I'll try and reply though.

 

I'm sure he'd have a case if he wanted to genuinely spend the rest of his life fighting a lost cause and scraping pocket change from YouTube account holders, but anyone with this type of character as their property has to acknowledge a certain portion of his revenue comes from people sharing his character and making more people aware of it.

 

Such action would probably be like biting the hand that feeds him and I'd imagine YouTube probably police that aspect of their community well. These days lots videos are no longer available due to copyright claims.

 

But this guy isn't hitting out against the people who made his creation popular here. He's pissed off at the fact that a development studio with ties to a worldwide entertainment company has plucked his idea off the Internet and thrown it into a new video game which they stand to make a fair amount of money from. All this without contacting him for consent.

 

This worldwide company have had no reservations about asking people to respect copyright of their intellectual property in the past. It's the right of anyone who creates anything to enforce theirs back.

 

They sought permission to include Nintendo characters in the game, Disney sought permission to include popular gaming characters in their movie. Hell, even Family Guy routinely ran their cutaway Star Wars jokes by Lucasfilm before committing them to an episode. Asking permission seems to work well, but that was neglected here because, hey, it's just a meme, right?

 

Nope, that meme is someone's creation. They own that image and that character, as bizarre of a concept as that is for a lot of us to understand.

 

If they'd tossed Homer Simpson into the game as an easter egg, I bet Fox would have had something to say about it and this whole thing would have been on a much wider scale.

 

 

The outcome? Warner Bros. will either trounce these guys with their army of lawyers and then patch the characters out of the game OR they'll settle this out of court and then patch the characters out. A third possibility is a payout where the creators are happy for the characters to continue to be used and a lesson will be learned, we'll have to wait and see.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Guy

[Cube]

They included many, many things. The biggest problem is likely the lack or research by 5th Cell over it - they took lots of popular internet memes that were posted by a great many different sources, with no clear copyright or anything like that, as well as many different versions of it (many based on video game characters). The most common response I've seen to this news is "what? someone owns it?".

 

Perhaps the entire point of this is them simply making a statement to answer that question: "yes, somebody owns it".

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

It does bring up an interesting topic, though, because although these particular memes can be said to be owned by someone, I imagine a lot of them can't. That's the more challenging aspect of this debate, I'd say, that the idea of copyright and idea ownership might not be able to keep up with the collective nature of memes.

[Guy]

There's a difference between slapping some text on an image of someone and actually creating an original character.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Oh, yeah, definitely. I was talking in very broad terms. I just think it's very interesting how the world of ideas is changing.

[Serebii]

If I had made a meme and it was on Scribblenauts, I wouldn't look to sue, I'd be happy that something I made has got so big.

 

It's not like they're using it as an advertisement for the game or it's a selling point. Or it's even something that crops up in gameplay as standard...it's a cool little easter egg

Edited May 5, 2013 by Serebii

[Rummy]

I'd be willing to bet that this IS the holdup in Europe, which is good to know I guess.

 

As for the matter at hand; I'm with Guy on this - and the guys suing. WB wouldn't hesitate the other way round, and I think it's good that these guys are putting up the fight. It's a shame if it's causing the EU holdup with Scribblenauts, but I like that they're going after a giant like WB with a rather valid case.

[Daft]

Not going to lie, I'd totally sue with the aim to settle.