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Game Maker Trademarked? Unlikely.

According to the YoYo Games website, the name “Game Maker” is a registered trademark, denoted by the (TM) symbol beside it on their website.

I am not one to speak for English or Netherlands’s law system (wherever the company is now said to be located).. however, what I do know is that in most western living style countries (Canada, USA, Australia etc.), it is no longer possible (if ever possible) to register a trademark for a phrase of non-innovative words in regular English that describe a product or service.

For example, you cannot register a trademark for “Food Chiller”, “Wood Carver”, “Screen Cleaner”, “Game Maker”, “Foldable Chair”, “Chocolate Peanuts” etc. because these are all short descriptive phrases using common words that have no special meaning, and no extraordinary significance.

At this point, even if the company was able to find a copyright/trademark or lawyer’s office that would issue a registered trademark certificate for the “Game Maker” name, it would be no use, since it would never stand up in court.

The judge would see that there are many other programs out there called “Gamemaker”, “GameMaker”, “Game Builder”, and probably even “Game Maker” and this would indicate to him or her that the name had no particular innovation if he/she hadn’t realized that already. That is enough grounds to dismiss the claim and trademark.

I speak from experience, a company I was involved in, semi-recently had a legal dispute over a couple of trademarks they owned. Despite having the actual trademark certificates and such, the trademarks were dismissed and seen as irrelevant in court. To give an example, I believe one of them was “Ice Chiller”.

YYG: User suggestion becomes reality?

J-Factor, a well known member of the GMC has made a public suggestion for managing submitted games and determining their level of security / ‘safeness’.

Users can upload either safe/secure games or normal games. Safe games would have a special status icon (e.g. a green tick) to show they are safe to play. Normal games would have a question mark icon to show that there may be a risk.

When you attempt to download a normal game it should display a mild warning (that could be disabled in user preferences) and perhaps a checkbox where you agree not to hold YoYo Games responsible. The “unknown risk” status for normal games could be changed by user voting or a moderator. Once a certain number of users have voted the game as “Safe” simply change the status.

Sandy commented to say the YYG team likes the suggestion J-Factor made and has decided to listen to the public on this one and will most likely implement such a system in the near future. Sandy did say however, that this suggestion can’t be implemented in time for the first public beta release of the website.

+1 for YoYo Sounds like a fair compromise to the safe-mode policy they are encouraging

Mark Prefers GMS over 64D?

While the Games Showcase is still a big name in the gaming community… it has become decreasingly popular lately with less and less updates and less and less activity. 64Digits on the other hand is thriving compared to it’s competitors: Games Showcase and Game Maker Games (currently being relocated to a new host and has effectively been dead for month(s)).

Mark recently removed the link to the Game Maker Games website from the official Game Maker page after GMG started experiencing problems with their host. Instead Mark suggested users visit the Games Showcase. It is surprising that there hasn’t been a mention to the 64Digits community, and perhaps there is something we don’t know about, that Mark is holding against them.

Anyone with information on the subject, please feel free to comment.

Alternative GM7 Download

If you haven’t noticed already, the Yo Yo Games site has being missing functionality lately in that there appears to be only one page, a place-holder.

This also means Game Maker 7 can’t be downloaded the traditional way. A user on the GMC however is letting us know that Google’s cached version of the download Game Maker page has kept intact with the official off-site link (on amazon) where you can download Game Maker.

The link works, and for whatever reason if you need to download or re-download Game Maker in the next few days, please see here.

In case you happen to be wondering, Mark has confirmed that the download removal was a mistake. In order to have a smooth transition to the new Yo Yo site, member signups were disabled. Unfortunately, the company managing the site didn’t read the memo right and ended up taking a lot more down than just the signup page. They are working on fixing this problem, but during the weekend this can prove difficult.

64Digits Spam Attack

64Digits has reported various spam and hacking attempts from a user called miller. Despite temporarily disabling account signups, the user managed to bypass this and register new accounts anyway for the purpose of spamming as much as possible.

The report was issued as follows:

I’m sure most of you know about the recent spam attacks. We have disabled new account registering, but Millar seems to be able to make new accounts, and has attacked the site multiple times with spam.

We are not taking this lightly. We are doing everything we can to make sure it stops.

Please do NOT bombard the staff with messages about the spam, because we are aware.

YYG Site Terms Preview

An anonymous user from Europe writes to tell us of the possible changes in the new terms of use policy. Although the terms and conditions are by no means final,  here is a compact summary of the current version:

In plain English, some of the [leaked] terms outline how users are waiving some of their rights to the game and giving them to YoYo Games when the game is submitted and uploaded to their site. Essentially YYG would have rights to use a submitted game in most cases, however it wants. They are even able to request that it is modified to their liking, and if you can believe it, possibly even sell your game! It appears as though this wouldn’t require any permission on your part, although it is unlikley YYG would do this without your permission.

In summary, unless you want to give many of your rights to your creations up to YoYo Games and let them benefit from using the game everywhere, changing it, and possibly even making money from it… you may want to choose an alternative site to host your games.

Opinions?

Note 1: The source of this news cannot be confirmed as the user was anonymous. However, a moderator later confirmed that the terms that are being referred to in this article are genuine [ see comment below ].

Note 2: The terms and conditions have many similarities to the terms found here http://www.perplexcity.com/about/terms/. This may either indicate YoYo Games is planning to base their license off of this current one.

Yourself In hospital

Yourself (moderator at the GMC) was reported to have gone to the hospital after feeling unwell and dizzy.

It is said that he went for a brain scan today (Saturday). No further information is known at this point, or whether anything is wrong.

Lets all hope he is ok, most of us enjoy his brilliance and humour.

Welcome to GMRumors

Welcome to GMRumors

The purpose of this blog is to make article posts about rumors (related to Game Maker) which haven’t been confirmed yet. When an article on GMRumors has enough reliable sources to back up its claims, it will be bumped up to the (main) GMNews blog. Feel free to discuss and contribute your rumors on this blog. We encourage all users to share what they know and have open discussions about their thoughts on Game Maker related issues and what they predict may happen in the future.