I wrote last week about the Tim Langdell/Edge Games’ lawsuit against EA over a range of “Edge”-related trademarks, in which Mr Langdell took a beating to put it lightly.
Here’s a few updates since then:
- Rob Crossley at Develop reports that Edge Games is also involved in a legal dispute with Future Publishing, publisher of Edge Magazine – though I would expect that to be settled or discontinued reasonably quickly after the Edge/EA lawsuit.
- Alec Meer at Gamesindustry.biz reports that EA’s lawyers submitted a draft court order requiring Langdell/Edge Games to relinquish their Edge trademarks and to communicate this to all the affected parties personally by October 15th 2010 (ouch). It now looks from the court file like the judge has now endorsed that order – which means that Langdell and Edge Games don’t have much longer with those trademarks…
- Apparently EA and Edge Games have agreed that they will each pay their own legal costs. This surprised me, as I would have expected EA to demand that Langdell/Edge Games pay its legal costs, but I guess they felt they had had enough. Or, potentially, they thought Langdell/Edge might not be able to pay anyway. In any event, Langdell/Edge will have to pay their own lawyers’ costs, which are probably fairly chunky themselves.
All this leaves open one very interesting question: what happens to the Edge trademarks after Edge Games relinquish them? It seems to me that the likely candidates are: (1) EA applies to register them; or (2) Future Publishing applies to register some of them; or (3) Future and EA agree not to do anything (maybe via a standstill agreement). Watch this space…
p.s. Jim Rossignol at RPS has pointed to a Eurogamer feature on Langdell and Edge Games written back in 2009, if anyone is interested in the backstory…
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