Trademark Violation Notice

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To whomever is concerned,

The name ‘SimpleRPG’ is trademarked by the Mages Guild Society and its affiliates, as per the publication of a pen and paper RPG under this name in 2012. We need to discuss, and to resolve, this issue with the administration of this site to discuss licensing and other options to you.

This is the name of a published pen and paper RPG system and is not free to use. Please contact me to to further this discussion.

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I don’t feel addressed by this, just see this comment as my opinion in this claim:

I’m not sure if you are serious because your comment lacks lots of relevant information to even respond in an adequate way. If you want to give more non-public information you can mail to “easyrpg easyrpg org”.

  1. It is not possible to determine from this post if you are legally allowed to file this claim.
  2. I can’t find the “Mages Guild Society” via a google search. Please link the website.
  3. You don’t link the database where the Trademark is registred
  4. Also “SimpleRPG” is a very generic term (like EasyRPG) so the likelyhood that somebody comes up with the same name is extremely high. Just search for “Simple RPG” in Google, you will find hundreds of them.

The definition of a trademark violation is “Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion , deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services.”

  1. You must explain how the term “EasyRPG” is confusing to “SimpleRPG” (Note: At least in Germany the same term can be actually multiple times depending on the scope. E.g. when you register a trademark for “toys” then the trademark does not apply to “software” of the same name).
  2. You must explain how people can confuse the free open source software for creating and playing RPG Maker games with a pen and paper product they have to buy somewhere. There is no overlap at all here. You can’t even create pen & paper games with EasyRPG.
  3. The term EasyRPG is used since 2007 (so called “prior art”). Here is a blog from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20110815102217/http://easy-rpg.org/blog/2010/07/new-blog/ and here is a commit mentioning EasyRPG from 2007: https://github.com/EasyRPG/Player/commit/55f3fb2faff0130a87c7ac1497492895ef1c7c54 EDIT: Website from 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060105112618/http://www.easyrpg.net/
2 Likes
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My apologies, I had confused a few products under our care. We have SimpleRPG, a P&P system, and YsyRPG, which is unrelated; and this obviously, while phonetically similar, is not a direct violation.

Please disregard the former notice. One of our associates brought it to my attention, and knowing that we had products with a phonetically identical name, I acted as was required of my position. FWIW, as you are open source software, had this been a genuine issue, we would only have requested ownership acknowledgement for the use of the name itself.