Warner Bros. sends Cease and Desist letter to the MERP Mod team for Skyrim

Warner Brothers have sent a cease and desist letter to the creators of "Middle Earth Roleplaying Project" for Skyrim. The developement of the mod has stopped since this order from WB, but the team says that this is not finished yet.

Link to this news:http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-project/news/merp-cd

They could just make a satire of middle earth and problem solved.

pathetic.

pathetic.

jakes456

[QUOTE="jakes456"]

pathetic.

Toxic-Seahorse

And yet those guys who created World of Warcraft in Minecraft are left alone?

[QUOTE="jakes456"]

pathetic.

Toxic-Seahorse

What is art

They did a bad job with their first LOTR game, so they're worried about their future games not selling due to the fact that people would just play the MERP mod in Skyrim for the LOTR experience. It would actually be the company's fault for not creating a game worth buying.

[QUOTE="jakes456"]

pathetic.

Toxic-Seahorse

There are many LOTR mods for other games, byt the only send a c&d to a mod for a very popular game. Ya, everyone can see what's going on here.

Same thing happened to a LOTR/middle earth mod for Oblivion that was looking very promising:(

Just make a damn proper LOTR RPG then instead of stopping all the others from trying

I have heard that one of the reasons that they C&D innovative, good projects like this is because in copyright law, they can lose their status with said copyright if they do not defend it when being infringed upon. Probably haven't translated that very well from legal terms into human terms, but I blame flawed copyright laws. I still put blame into WB for having to be so evil as to C&Ding a project that does not make any profits.

This could be minorly beneficial to WB. For exampe, Skyrim customer loves Skyrim, but doesn't know much about Lotr. Said Skyrim customer sees this huge Lotr mod and tries it out. This customer has now been introduced to Lotr through an entirely different means of advertisement. Especially because MERP is a completely non-profit project. I don't see what WB gains by the C&D.

The lengths that all of these large corporations go to sue the little guys in fear of a .0001% drop in profits really grinds my gears.

I personally don't think WB have the strongest grounds in the world. It's a mod, a nonchalant piece of work created by lots of individuals working in their own time to release a modification for a another game. It's not like they're even releasing a free, standalone game, it's a mod. I think the word needs to be spread more.

[QUOTE="Toxic-Seahorse"]

[QUOTE="jakes456"]

pathetic.

MadCat46

They have a habit of doing this. I remember them taking draconic measures against 11-year old kids with Space Jam fan sites back in the day. Big men gonna act big.

pathetic.

jakes456

and yes Mr. Money goes to money

[QUOTE="MadCat46"][QUOTE="Toxic-Seahorse"] Yeah. How dare companies protect their brand names!!

Toxic-Seahorse

You say this like WB cares. If they aren't making any money off of it than they don't want anyone to use it.

Warner Bros. has spoken guys it's out of our hands now, no matter how much we like it or not. Cease and Desist immediately or they will be forced to take action. Surrender! lol

Anyways if i was part of the Mod team i'd just change the name of the mod and release it anyway. I think thats what they're going to do, change a few things here and there and we'll get to see it.

PS: I think it'd be pretty cool being contacted by a big name company like Warner Bros even if it wasn't for some good news. :P

[QUOTE="Toxic-Seahorse"]

[QUOTE="jakes456"]

pathetic.

MadCat46

1) They spent a lot of money to get that exlcusive licence to make Lord of the Rings games, so...yeah, they're going to defend their investment.

2) The free mod still has a lot of potential to hurt their sales (for example, people looking for a LotR game might buy Skyrim rather than their own products), and it's never a good thing to set a trend of letting other people use the IP that they've licenced.

What sucks is these big corporations don't do #$%^ worth buying with these licenses. Kind of like EA with the NFL license, if another company were allowed to make an NFL game EA would be forced to actually improve theirs.

[QUOTE="MadCat46"][QUOTE="Toxic-Seahorse"] Yeah. How dare companies protect their brand names!!Toxic-Seahorse

They could just not use any of the names from LOTR but make it blatantly obvious that it's set in toikens universe.

Warner Bros. is being overprotective of intellectual propery.

Tolkien estate sues over Lord of the Rings online games <--- lol this thing was listed at the top of "More from Gamespot"

and yes Mr. Money goes to money

STEVEWADE93

Did you really need to bump this dead thread to say that?

There's a mod for Rome total war that makes it LOTR, and I think there was a mod like this on oblivion. Why are they just now stopping these mods?

There's a mod for Rome total war that makes it LOTR, and I think there was a mod like this on oblivion. Why are they just now stopping these mods?

cain006

pretty sure they issued a cease and desist order regarding the oblivion mod, too.