I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
Yeah sorry man, that's clearly IKEA so it's obvious they had to act on it. Can't sell IKEA-branded games without their permission. Even on their Steam trailer, the first second is clearly IKEA. Just changing the name is not enough. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1593010/The_Store_is_Clos...
Sometimes it's not that deep. Sometimes the cute little indie dev just made a mistake.
The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.
No reasonable person would have been confused into thinking it was an official IKEA game; IANAL, but it seems unlikely to me that IKEA would have ultimately prevailed in court, though a simple change to the color of the logo would probably have been helpful to the devs of the game.
It's a direct ripoff of https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008, a popular sci-fi horror story set in an IKEA. At the time the game was also using IKEA's brand colors.
The game description on Steam even explicitly mentions "SCP Foundation", which the creator also doesn't have the rights to use unless the whole game is Creative Commons-licensed.
You can only defend your trademark with respect to product categories that you actually market. Unless IKEA were in the business of selling parody video games, their trademark doesn't apply.
Wait... is that why IKEA just put out a parody video game?
The game is not itself a store or advertising a real store. It is an entirely different product category. Parody is still legal and allowed as fair use, the likeness is the point. This is hardly the most egregious example that I have seen.
Ultimately, these matters would likely be decided in court. IANAL either but it seems like the game maker would have a strong case. Among the things IKEA would have to prove is actual harm and confusion, who would seriously argue that? That doesn't mean IKEA couldn't make it impossible to fight with their unlimited legal resources, I can understand not wanting to spend a chunk of your life on that.
Two things can be true at once: this is the most creative marketing in recent memory and genuinely funny, and IKEA destroyed someone's work simply because they can.
You can also defend it against tarnishment. They can argue that IKEA appearing in a violent video game has negative associations with their trademarks.
Unethical IP lawyers spew that nonsense all the time. Failing to enforce your trademark against a tiny alleged infringer has no effect on your trademark rights at all.
This is false, however this is not seem like a case where trademark is being infringed. If someone else opens a store called Ikea they obviously have to shut it down.
IKEA has a trade dress and the game matches their color scheme and font exactly. The building is clearly an IKEA with the exact same branding, just different four letter name.
That would apply to like a competitor, right? Another store that copies their motif to fool customers.
Has a court enforced trade dress with a mock version of a store within a game?
Would a reasonable person, seeing completely different letters actually think IKEA is sponsoring the game?
I would give IKEA almost a 0% chance of winning that case if both sides had equally sized pocketbooks. (see E.S.S. Entertainment v. Rock Star Videos (2008))
Society however determines how we respond when a company abuses a law. Just because suing indie developers may be the best action for IKEA to protect their trademarks does not mean we should let it be the best action for them overall.
> Further, there’s at least the possibility on the part of the developer to claim that such usage is a “parody,” with parody and satire protected at the highest levels of American law through the application of First Amendment freedom of speech rights. However, courts will often require actual commentary to be made in order to extend such protections. In that way, a store name like “I CAN’T A” (or something far more clever) has a greater chance of succeeding than simply using a play on the word “store” in Scandinavian.
Trademark is about preventing someone's brand for being confused for another. Unless someone was confusing this for being an official IKEA product I'm not sure why it would be in the ballpark of trademark.
There is also trade dress of course but that isn't really related.
No, tradmarks can be parodied too. It's a first amendment protection, and extremely common in movies, TV and video games.
If the developer worked with a lawyer they could've gotten any suit by IKEA (this wasn't a suit yet, just a cease and desist letter) quickly dismissed.
This is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.”
Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.
IANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch.
That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.
A bit of a tangent to Weird Al, who often is said to not need the permission of the original artist because his songs are parodies, usually isn't commenting on the actual content of the original song but instead takes the lyrics and gives them a different theme. 'Smells like Nirvana' is one of the few songs he does that actually does directly parody the original. His videos are far more parody than the songs themselves. Makes me wonder where the legal line actually is drawn and if asking permission is actually because it would be too risky not to.
There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.
My understanding is that a parody has to actually parody the original work. There's a distinction between "parodying" and "using the songwriting with different lyrics". You see a lot of people doing riffs on "What a Wonderful World" and getting shut down by the Louis Armstrong estate, e.g.
Very interesting link. I am now confused and intrigued that the trademark for "heroin" is listed as being revoked as part of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
Part VIII, Annex VI on reparations: Germany was forced to renounce trademark rights on pharmaceutical and chemical products in favor of the Allied powers, so Bayer's Aspirin and Heroin were included.
Though that is not the type of abandonment that IKEA is worried about in this case. In fact it isn't really clear what form of trademark abandonment IKEA would have to be concerned about for this action to be justified. IANAL but IKEA is definitely not worried about the trademark being ruled abandoned due to non-use, procedural issues or naked licensing; they can easily prove the mark(s) are in active use, and the other two are not related to trademark enforcement.
Again, IANAL but we do need to stop spreading FUD about what trademarks entail. Trademarks are meant to protect a brand from being diluted or confused, not to police the world of all parody or reference to some thing. In fact, if the store in the game wasn't even called an IKEA, I am really curious what "trademark" they felt it violated, but unfortunately not curious enough to find out.
P.S.: a better example of a trademark that fell to non-use would be "Twitter". However I personally dunno if there is a trademark that fell specifically because they didn't bully enough people who tried to use their trademark in ways that wouldn't be confused with their brand. That seems to be a made-up invention by corporate lawyers that people just accept at face value. If it really worked this way, the mark "JavaScript" should've fallen a long time ago.
Fallout 4 parodies the potential legal issue itself in one of its loading screens:
Nuka-Cola's signature rocket-shaped bottle replaced the traditional curved bottle when a rival corporation successfully sued for patent infringement. Fortunately, the public saw the new bottle as an improvement and Nuka-Cola's sales increased.
Kind of reminds me of a college classmate back in the 80s made a Hypercard game which he had called Escape from Harvey Mudd but which the college asked (maybe demanded?) that it be renamed as it started to get distribution so the more commonly seen version was called Escape from Grid Tech. I would guess that there might have been some reputational concerns as that classmate was one of the people who dropped out of Mudd during my time there (the late 80s cohorts had a lot of people, myself included, who had wavered between humanities and sciences and after exposure to life in the sciences decided to opt for the humanities instead—most of us ended up doing programming for a living having no marketable skills post-college. The one person from my freshman year suite who actually finished his degree at Mudd went on to become a music professor).
Did not expect to see Mudd mentioned in the comment section on HN for an IKEA Skyrim mod... Not really surprised the admin was like that given the name, but I hope things worked out well for y'all.
IKEA is the only furniture store with a four-letter name in that same typeface in yellow on a blue building even though it is called 'STYR' here. It is the only furniture store using that uniform, also blue-yellow, for its personnel. The game maker clearly used IKEA as an inspiration but forgot that 'inspiration' is not the same as 'duplication'. They could have made the building red, used a serif typeface and a 7-character name, dressed their 'personnel' in red-green uniforms, etc. and IKEA would not have bothered them. Now, they did, and right they were.
The factory builder game Captain of Industry has a building you can add on to a settlement which sells household goods and furniture to the population. It's a blue building with yellow trim and a big sign on the front that says IDEA. I wonder if this is just small potatoes enough of a parody that IKEA wouldn't care about it.
Some of the early backrooms lore and levels were based on noclipping in furniture stores or even IKEA directly since it was all fan made stuff not caring about the legal ramifications.
I tried to find a link but it’s impossible now that backrooms is a popular IP
And having been in an empty IKEA, it definitely had that liminal feel
You could take an area of Google Earth and let it be 'improved' by AI. So you could add a playground instead of a parking lot, or add migrants near a border post.
Due to consequences unforeseen by Google, it was used more for the latter.
I'm not sure how statistics track it, but when you're moderator on a subreddit you can see how many visitors use old reddit.
Last month for mine it was 1%. Now. This could be more due to their tracking not working for most old reddit users (I assume most have adblock), but it's unlikely to be a lot more.
The large majority of Reddit users are on the app. I'm honestly surprised they haven't killed old reddit off yet, and yes, I've used it myself for the longest time until I started missing some features.
I used Old Reddit for a long time, but I could tell the vast majority of users were on the app now, just because the comment culture had changed completely.
For example, posts now draw most of their comments within 30-60 minutes of posting, and then almost no comments thereafter. This is surely due to the app emphasizing continual novelty for the sake of engagement, and anything old is no longer shown. A big difference from before, when posts would draw discussion all day long.
The use of a phone app as a default interface also means comments have become reduced to 140-character quips. If you post a solid paragraph or two on many hobby subreddits, you'll just come across as a weirdo.
As far as I'm aware the big problem they have is that while most of the visitors use new reddit, a very significant chunk of commenters and mods still use old reddit which they can't really afford to lose
I see similar stats too, it really seems like old reddit has died off, I remember when the redesign was newer looking at these stats and old was dominating, so I'm inclined to trust them relatively.
Google API keys have been used for ages on the frontend. For example on Google Maps embeds. Those are not possible without exposing a key to the frontend. They weren't secret, until Gemini arrived.
If one ignores 70% of the documentation, it makes for a demonizing blog post about it, sure.
"
API keys for Firebase services are not secret
API keys for Firebase services only identify your Firebase project and app to those services. Authorization is handled through Google Cloud IAM permissions, Firebase Security Rules, and Firebase App Check.
All Firebase-provisioned API keys are automatically restricted to Firebase-related APIs. If your app's setup follows the guidelines in this page, then API keys restricted to Firebase services do not need to be treated as secrets, and it's safe to include them in your code or configuration files.
Set up API key restrictions
If you use API keys for other Google services, make sure that you apply API key restrictions to scope your API keys to your app clients and the APIs you use.
Use your Firebase-provisioned API keys only for Firebase-related APIs. If your app uses any other APIs (for example, the Places API for Maps or the Gemini Developer API), use a separate API key and restrict it to the applicable API."
The only reasonable design is to have two kinds of API keys that cannot be used interchangeably: public API keys, that cannot be configured to use private APIs, and private API keys, that cannot be configured to use public APIs. There's no one who must use a single API key for both purposes, and almost all cases in which someone does configure an API key like that will be a mistake. It would be even better if the API keys started with a different prefix or had some other easy way to distinguish between the two types so that I can stop getting warnings about my Firebase keys being "public".
It'd be much better to call them something like "API usernames" or "API Client IDs". Though I also dislike the naming of "public keys" in asymmetric cryptography, for the same reasons, and I'm definitely not winning that fight!
Back then, they did not automatically restrict those keys to only Firebase-related APIs.
So yes, if you read the documentation as it exists today it's much more clear what they're trying to prevent, but this is only after this issue has become more apparent.
> Back then, they did not automatically restrict those keys to only Firebase-related APIs.
If that is the case, why is this also in the 2022 link?
The part about scoping links to the restrictions documentation.
"Understand API keys
API keys for Firebase services are not secret
Firebase uses API keys only to identify your app's Firebase project to Firebase services, and not to control access to database or Cloud Storage data, which is done using Firebase Security Rules. For this reason, you do not need to treat API keys for Firebase services as secrets, and you can safely embed them in client code. Learn more about API keys for Firebase.
Set up API key scoping
As an additional deterrent against an attacker attempting to use your API key to spoof requests, you can create API keys scoped to your app clients.
Keep FCM server keys secret
Unlike API keys for Firebase services, FCM server keys (used by the legacy FCM HTTP API) are sensitive and must be kept secret.
Keep service account keys secret
Also unlike API keys for Firebase services, service account private keys (used by the Admin SDK) are sensitive and must be kept secret.
"
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