It's pretty funny, Warcraft and Starcraft are both blatant ripoffs of GW's Warhammer and WH40k. I even recall reading somewhere the original Warcraft RTS was to be an officially licensed Warhammer game. But gee whiz, I wonder why we don't see legal action brought against Blizzard?
Starcraft rips off both WH40k and Aliens, but I think it rips of Aliens more. Plus, Aliens was released 1 year before WH40k, so it has precedence. And Aliens ripped off Starship Troopers (the book), and Starship Troopers (the movie) rips off Aliens. It's complicated.
WH original and Warcaft are both simpler - they both rip off LOTR.
This is a weak trademark, it has no secondary meaning that I can discern. You have marines. They're in space. Thus, "space marines." That would seem to fall under the weaker classes of trademark protection[1] and even though I have long known about Warhammer 40K, the words "space marines" do not make me (or most other people I know) think of Warhammer 40K. Personally, that term makes me think of the Aliens movie and Starcraft. They're nowhere near as famous.
Of course, the problem here is that they have more lawyers and wherewithal to contest this than most. Your average person does not have the resources to make a federal case out of this and their lawyers have a perverse incentive to be assholes when trying to prop up a weak trademark claim.
This is all true and the interesting part of the story. My point is that just crying "prior art" doesn't work in trademark. Observations like yours do.
So, putting "Space Marine" in a title might a bad idea, but having marines in space (with or without mechanized body suits) should be fine. To reduce legal risks, you might want to call them "Space Core Maines" or "Space Marine Core".
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say are a scientist and there are many programmers who are not scientists?
I presume he's talking about people who probably shouldn't be programming (those that routinely write code the likes of which show up on thedailywtf.com; you know, stuff that assigns variables multiple times in a row). Apart from that, it's also telling that even most "computer scientists" don't know much outside of programming, even for the domains they work in. I count myself lucky that I get to work with people who have PhDs in basic sciences on a daily basis; just keeping up in work discussions requires delving into some really interesting science papers and books. Granted, I couldn't write you Dijkstra's algorithm right away, but that's why I keep the CLR book around.
Correct. I am talking about people who are not very good at logic and scientific reasoning. People who know how things "are" (because someone taught them so in the university) and don't care why. People who blindly follow "design patterns" and use their "hammer", regardless of the screw they are trying to deal with.
People who say "I only learned Pascal at school. Let's use that for the problem at hand" (No offence to Pascal and people using it).
People who know the Java standard libraries by heart (and have an excellent diploma because of that), but can't produce a simple working program, because they lack understanding of the nature of computing.
The above are real examples of people I have worked with.
