Tim Langdell Loses IGDA Membership
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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Don't let the door hit your fat arse on the way out.
Basically, Langdell owns a game that is built on his trademark of the word "Edge".Ahlycks said:
Through the labyrinthine mess of the trademarks, this means he can sue anyone using the word "Edge" anywhere in their game - but he MUST sue everyone, or he loses that claim.
All he had to do to keep it was to start making another game - and claim that their game might be mistaken as his, but he just kept suing.
Then he took on EA, and they stomped his testes through the floor.
This is why we cheer on this day.
I'd say he was more of a hemorrhoid than a boil. You just drain the boil and it heal, hemorrhoids in the other hand...SimuLord said:
(Did I spell it correctly?)
Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.
He's a trademark troll, to put it in the simplest terms. The way I understand it, he claim that since his company was named "Edge", he had domain over pretty much anything with "Edge" in the name.Ahlycks said:
He's not a game developer, by virtue of never actually having developed a game. Oh, sure he's listed products which his company allegedly made, but none of them have ever actually existed.Ahlycks said:
What he is is a fraudster and con artist, with whom the USPTO will hopefully soon be having Words about the fraudulent filings he made to them on which much of his subsequent fraud has been based.
It's a bit tough to explain if "big business language" makes your head pop, but basically it goes like this: Langdell, through his company Edge Games, trademarked the word "edge" and several related phrases, like "gamer's edge," etc. And he has spent the last, oh, couple of decades or so licensing his trademark to anyone even tangentially related to the game industry who wanted to use it - Edge Magazine, Edge PCs, you name it.Ahlycks said:
Most companies went along with it because it's usually cheaper to just pony up than to pay the costs associated with a protracted legal battle. But a couple years ago, Langdell went after an independent French studio called Mobigame, which had developed a popular iPhone game called Edge. (Edge by Mobigame if you want to look for it.) Instead of capitulating, Mobigame fought back. The Mobigame fight brought the Langdell/Edge nonsense to the attention of the general public, as least as it relates to gamers. It was, as they say, the beginning of the end.
While that was raging on, EA released Mirror's Edge, leading to threats from Langdell, but perhaps inspired by the groundswell of opinion against him, EA met him head on. They went to court (in an action ironically filed by Langdell) and he was crushed.
The obvious glee people are taking in his defeat is the result of his years of bad behaviour, bending over everyone he could while he himself actually produced nothing. You've probably noticed several comments in this thread about how Langdell actually doesn't make games, and although I believe he did back in the C-64 era, there really hasn't been anything since. That was a big part of his courtroom downfall: His claim that Edge Games is actively making games is bullshit.
The courts essentially confirmed what the game industry realized long ago: That Langdell was one of the most egregious trademark trolls in the history of the business. Now he's paying for it.
(All of the above is "top of my head" stuff, btw, so feel free to correct/fill in the blanks as required.)