Remember Tim Langdell, the guy who owned the trademark 'Edge' and sued anyone who used it in a videogame title?
In October, a court stripped him of his trademarks. As a result, Mobigames' "Edge" is now coming out on Steam. You can follow the entire absurd tale at
Rock Paper Shotgun and
Chaos Edge.
The abridged full story, for those who missed the start: A guy named Tim Langdell, whose company Edge produced games in the Commodore 64 era, registered the trademark Edge and tried to sue anyone who used it in a videogame context. This went largely unreported until he had an indy game called Edge
pulled from the App Store and demanded royalties. He also tried to sue EA for Mirror's Edge, supporting his claim by announcing
a fake game called Mirrors with box art stolen from a guy on Deviantart.
In an uncharacteristic move of EA looking out for the little guy, they sued (successfully, we now know) to have the 'Edge' trademark revoked, as his company hadn't actually released a game since the early 90s. He attempted to counter this by announcing fake games. A judge discovered that Langdell had photoshopped images in his trademark application to give the impression that he produced both Edge magazine and Marvel's comic "Edge".
He was also sued by the publishers of Edge magazine, who had licensed the trademark from Tim Langdell since 1994 and were somewhat miffed that he had been using their magazine's logo as his own without permission. Langdell responded by claiming he invented the logo first, and produced a 5.25" floppy disk with a file dated 1991, which an expert discovered had been created using Windows 95.
