How crypto bros wrested Flappy Bird from its creator
How crypto bros wrested Flappy Bird from its creator
arstechnica.com
How crypto bros wrested Flappy Bird from its creator
11 comments
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Literal scum of the earth
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I mean, isn't that how trademark is supposed to work? I'm no expert or anything but the original creator hadn't used the trademark in over ten years and ostensibly had no intention to do so. He also didn't respond to the notice of opposition.
Seems to me the courts did the right thing in letting gametech have the trademark if they intended to use it.
That's not to say that I support them making a shitty Cryptobro game but them obtaining the trademark by itself doesn't really seem shady to me.
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Yep, that's exactly how it works. They're douchebags but this is how TMs work.
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I would be entirely fine with Flappy Bird passing into the public domain, but this isn't even that. They actually own it now.
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So now they're gonna take on the liability of copying someone else's work, which is why the original creator kinda disappeared; they were worried about getting sued over both the concept (which he stole from a rather unknown game that released a year prior to Flappy Bird) and the use of the pipes taken straight out of Super Mario.
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This is funny looking.
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Very loaded and negative title. People wanted to make Flappy Bird publically available again, sincd its creator took it down indefinitely.
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It's very easy to make a mechanical clone of the game if someone wanted to play it.
This is purely about greedy crypto bros trying to grift off of Flappy Bird and using legal loopholes to steal the trademark
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They could’ve done that without the greedy crypto aspect, but as the enshittification trend goes, they just couldn’t help themselves.
But Gametech's efforts to legally acquire the Flappy Bird name seem to go back much further than that. Back in 2014, an outfit called Mobile Media Partners tried to claim the Flappy Bird trademark in a filing made mere days after Nguyen pulled the game from the App Store. Coincidentally enough, the specific New Jersey address listed by Mobile Media Partners on that 2014 application matches an address used by Gametech Holdings in the paperwork for its 2023 legal efforts.
Purely opportunistic bullshit and painting it as anything innocent is disingenuous.
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Did you even read the article?
This is not the same Flappy Bird. The original game already has been preserved, the APK is floating around if you know where to look.
This new game is an outright scam using stolen IP to trick users into thinking this is the original.
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They're scum for the grift but flappy bird doesn't deserve a trademark. US IP laws are draconian enough.
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11 comments