Because nyan-cat and keyboard cat aren't worth shit, and it's a desperate cash grab.
It really doesn't matter if they aren't "worth" anything to you, what matters is that a giant megacorp is using them in a commercial product without permission. Clearly, it's "worth" something to WB.
it's like Charles Schmidt is aware of how much he's a classless piece of shit, as obvious as it is that he's doing this because of greed/copyright trolling.
Everything nyan cat related is a piece of shit.
Again, it really doesn't matter if you think it's a piece of shit, clearly WB doesn't think so or they wouldn't be in there.
I think pop tart should sue the hell out of nyan-cat's creator. Completely bury him in lawyers for the reddit headlines alone.
It would be perfectly reasonable for them to sue to get him to stop using their trademarked product name if they don't want him to.
Great, now the next Scribblenauts games will be more limited.
Or they could just get permission?
Not to distract from your point too much, but Liebeck suffered third and forth degree burns from that hot coffee so bad that she nearly died.
People need to watch this shit and educate themselves before they spread the "lol coffee lawsuit" meme again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBKRjxeQnT4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2ktM-lIfeQ
We've got plenty of purposeful corporate apologists here, but in this case everyone is just being a corporate apologist through unthinking ignorance. Actual good youtube comment:
"I also laughed about how "stupid" Mrs. Liebeck was for her "frivolous" lawsuit... laughed and joked about it for years, until I learned the truth about her case just a few years ago. I was so ashamed I cried, thinking of all the times I'd laughed and called her stupid and unknowingly spread the lies and assumptions about her case. I cried thinking about a woman who never hurt anyone spending the last years of her life as a public laughing stock. How I wish I could apologize to her."
It's more the fact that they're blatantly cash-grabbing on phenomena that the internet spread and the internet made popular, completely independently of the "creator's" efforts.
Really, I believe memes shouldn't belong to anyone. To claim ownership, and then go out of your way to SUE others based off of something that a global community brought to light and shared / replicated / modified thousands of times, that's why they're assholes.
Now if they were to create a legitimate product, like a song or a movie, or pour legitimate R&D money into creating and marketing a brand or an image, that's one thing.
But these creators just created some random shit one day with NO intent on commercializing it and they got lucky...the internet made it popular. But instead of respecting that, they go to the lengths to "enforce their copyright on unauthorized replications," COMPLETELY neglecting the fact that it is harmless (albeit non-commercial) reproductions like this that spread their meme and made it profitable for them in the first place.
Yes I know it's within their rights to enforce something like this, it's just legal scumbaggery at its finest when you exploit something you never intended to sell or make popular, and then sue the living daylights out of harmless uses of it.
1) Picking and choose who is actually infringing your copyright or not is pretty basic to copyright law. Permission can be freely granted to some and not others.
2) Suing people who
aren't actually making money off your character (in other words basically everyone spreading the meme, harmless and non-commercially) would be the asshole thing to do, in this case. But instead he's just suing a giant megacorp who thought they could use it in a commercial product without permission - I don't really see how you can call him an asshole for that.
3) If only movies or songs can actually qualify for copyright... that's going to leave out the vast majority of creative works. Photographers, painters, and writers are totally screwed.
4) If the other arbiter of qualification for copyright is pouring "legitimate R&D money" then only rich individuals and large corporations will qualify. Basically, if you're not rich, fuck you, you don't qualify for protection under the law.
5) If "memes shouldn't belong to anyone" then basically anything that becomes really popular doesn't qualify for copyright ever... but isn't that the situation when copyright protection would matter the most?
6) How exactly does it matter that "the internet spread [it] and the internet made [it] popular?" He isn't suing anyone who helped spread it or make it popular on the internet free of charge (see #2), only a giant megacorp who is including it in a commercial product without permission.
There seems to be a lot of unstated worship of the wealthy and powerful mixed in with corporate apologism in your post and many of these other similar posts that we haven't even begun to unpack....
