Uh, say what now? Image: Infinity Ward
A lawsuit against Activision Blizzard was dismissed last month because, according to a judge in the Southern California district court where the suit was filed, the plaintiffs did not play enough of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare to make a case against the ‘publisher slandered. For once in Activision Blizzard’s many contentious legal battles, things ended smoothly.
According to a report from a litigation partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (who tipped off Kotaku), Activision Blizzard was sued in November 2021 by Brooks Entertainment, Inc., a California-based company specializing in in film and television production and other forms of entertainment. However, Kotaku was unable to find an official website for the company. Brooks Entertainment and its CEO, Shon Brooks, who describes himself as an inventor, claim to own the trademarks for the mobile financial games Save One Bank and Stock Picker. It should be noted that Kotaku was also unable to verify the existence of these games. Regardless, these three entities, along with Activision Blizzard and 2016’s Infinite Warfare, were at the center of the lawsuit.
In November 2021, Brooks Entertainment alleged that Activision stole the intellectual property of both Save One Bank and Stock Picker, as well as the identity of their owner, in Infinite Warfare. More specifically, the complaint claimed that the 2016 first-person shooter’s “main character,” Sean Brooks, was based on the company’s CEO, and that all three games had “scripted battle scenes that take place in a haute couture shopping center”. shopping centre.” There were other similarities as well, but these claims were the crux of the complaint.
But if you’ve only played an hour or so of Infinite Warfare, you’d know that everything is wrong. For one thing, the main character isn’t Corporal Sean Brooks, but his squadmate, Commander Nick Reyes, a Space Marine who becomes the captain of the game’s main militia. Also, while there is a scripted battle scene in a shopping mall, it takes place in far-future Geneva, one of the game’s many locations, and Sean Brooks isn’t there. You play as Reyes all the time.
In January 2022, counsel for Activision wrote to counsel for Brooks Entertainment that the complaint “contains[ed] material misrepresentations and errors of fact, and that the claims set forth therein are frivolous both in fact and in law.” If the company did not withdraw the suit, Activision would file for Rule 11 sanctions, which require the plaintiff pay a fine for making dubious or inadequate arguments without substantial or therefore accurate evidentiary support. And that’s exactly what happened in March 2022, when Activision filed its requests for sanctions against Brooks Entertainment, saying that the Plaintiffs were unable to play Infinite Warfare and submitted inaccurate submissions.
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The Southern District Court of California granted Activision’s motions on July 12, dismissed Brook Entertainment’s lawsuit with prejudice (meaning the claim cannot be brought before this court), and ordered the plaintiff’s attorney to compensate the troubled publisher for the money and time he lost. In its conclusion, the court said that the plaintiff failed to conduct a thorough and reasonable investigation of the relevant facts about the game before filing the lawsuit.
“Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is a first-person shooter, not first-person and third-person as claimed, and Sean Brooks does not perform a scripted battle scene in a high-fashion mall” , the court said in its decision. in favor of Activision. “Plaintiff’s counsel could have easily verified these facts before filing the baseless fact allegation, just as the court easily verified them within the first hour and a half of playing the game.”
Kotaku has reached out to Activision Blizzard for comment.
Richard Hoeg, a lawyer specializing in digital and video game law, told Kotaku that non-protectable concepts like people’s names used in fictional entertainment are quite difficult to prove copyright infringement.
“It’s hard to say why the suit came up,” Hoeg said. “Certainly, if an outfit gets kicked out *with penalties*, it wasn’t very good in the first place. It may simply be arrogance, or it may have been a lawyer pushing a lawsuit against a well-resourced party. The dress itself says [Brooks Entertainment] released a game to Activision between 2010 [and] 2015. That said, the infringement suit is awful, alleging infringement of such unprotected concepts as: “Shon Brooks surfs to exotic, action-packed locations and Sean Brooks surfs to exotic, action-packed locations.”
Hoeg went on to say that it’s difficult to get “actual sanctions imposed” because that would be a level of bad suit far above a simple dismissal.
“The court basically finds the whole argument crazy,” Hoeg concluded. “Brooks Entertainment even included Rockstar Games for no reason (which didn’t help their cause with the judge). So the sanctions here are Brooks Entertainment [has] to pay Activision’s legal fees and costs.”
While things may have ended well for Activision this time around, the scorned publisher is still causing legal headaches. Diablo developers just attacked the company for breaking the unions. Again. Phew.