Angry Birds Characters – Need To Be Trademarked?
In Continuing Our Discussion About Angry Birds:
In terms of what Angry Birds could consider to supplement their intellectual property portfolio, I would suggest trademarking the actual Angry Bird characters. Check out the trademarks DC Comics has obtained over the Superman figure (among others, US Registrations 1209743, 0391821 and 1235769). This would give them a more clear trademark infringement case should more “similar” products start appearing on the market. One other thing we have found useful in protecting three-dimensional images is design patents. For example, we have obtained design patents on everything from surfboard shapes (D527,781) to dolls (D567,306), from flashlight holders (D542,632) to Rattlesnake coffee mugs (D627,605).
The lawsuit provides some interesting claims made by Rovio — they state that by June of 2011 there had been 250 million downloads of Angry Birds – and some scary claims: “Players log more than 1 million hours of game time each day on the iOS version of the game”. A million hours a day? Disregarding legal issues, people spend a million hours a day playing Angry Birds? That’s over 114 years of “human time” spent every day playing this game. Quite impressive and equally scary.
In the interests of full disclosure, both my son and I have Angry Birds on our iPads and he stomps me at high scores on a regular basis. We also own several Angry Birds (the real ones), and I prefer the black one while my son prefers the red one when we play “Angry Birds and Pigs”.