I think we have a world record for the most fastest game to be cancelled and it's the game that was already cancelled, but some indie studio decided to revive the development out of nowhere and how the heck did Piko Interactive got the rights to the Glover series in the first place?
I chased it around for a little while but got bored before I fully connected the dots.
Step 1. Atari is a zombie company name these days. It is nothing at all to do with the people that put out consoles in the 80s. Various companies have since bought and sold the name, rebranded themselves are Atari when they wanted a bit more market recognition and then they went bankrupt and whatnot. To go through it all would be a long post, even by my standards.
Anyway Hasbro's "Hasbro Interactive" subsidiary were the original publishers/IP owners. When Hasbro was in hard times in the early 2000s they sold this subsidiary and things that went with it, this included the Atari name. The buyer (a once legendary publisher called infogrammes, in the 90s and up to that point they were basically the EA or Ubisoft of the day) rebranded themselves as Atari.
Zombie atari still went bankrupt and according to
https://kotaku.com/the-studio-that-announced-glover-2-didn-t-actually-have-1825395955 it appears they sold the IP to the glover franchise in 2017 to piko interactive.
IP law crash course then.
Three main types, plus a few others we will skip for now.
1) Copyright. Lasts probably over a century at this point,
if not forever. It covers text, graphics, music, level layout...
2) Patents. Can't be got for software, save for in Japan and the US (possibly elsewhere but nowhere really relevant for games). Term limits vary but around 20 years by the time all is said and done. They are supposed to be for how things work.
3) Trademarks. Have to be renewed, and have to be protected, but can be indefinite if renewed. This is the rights to exclusively use the name/a set logo/possibly some colours (though that can fall under whatever design rights and registered designs are called around you) for whatever you register it for (I might not be able to do glover the game, but might be able to do glover the business services company sort of thing). A nice game related example is why Resident Evil is known as Biohazard in its native Japan -- there was a band called Biohazard and they seemingly registered a trademark for them to maybe make a game based on their band name one day (it was a quite popular thing to do as a band once).
In this case it seems someone allowed 3) to lapse ($400 for 10 years for each class of goods in the US, a bit more in Europe
https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/eu-trade-mark-regulation-fees , nothing major to a company though) some time in 2008
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/get-detail?st13=EM500000000901942 https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/get-detail?st13=GB500000002175497 and
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:udqehk.2.7 . Quite a serious oversight from where I sit but happens I guess, especially if you are monster made from the parts of a hundred other companies and going bankrupt yourself.
Seeing this expiry it seems the Golden Mushroom people noticed and thought they would get it for themselves. This would have allowed them to make a game called Glover, or indeed Glover 2 and block new companies from making a game called Glover.
What goes for the existing company/current own would vary with where they are -- some places do "first to use" where others do "first to file" and an expired trademark is as good as no trademark at all. In Piko Interactive's statements appear to have forgot this, or they assumed their country's laws applied in all the places. That said it gets tricky, as law is wont to do,
https://www.fr.com/news/prior-user-vs-federal-registrant-whose-mark-is-it-anyway1/
In any case I don't think Piko Interactive would be able to block Golden Mushroom from publishing a game called Glover just on the trademark alone.
Golden Mushroom would not however have had the rights to use the glover art, level layouts, code from the original game or whatever exists of the second cancelled one... Copyright infringement would be the result of using that*, however it gets a bit tricky to demonstrate that in some cases. I don't see why they would not be able to make a 3d platform game with a cartoon disembodied hand running on a ball though. Piko Interactive might have tried to claim a hand running on a ball is a truly unique concept itself worthy of copyright protection but I am sure someone would just find a copy of Thing from the Addams family doing it and it would all be over.
*there have been very few legal cases involving copyright infringement in games.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...zynga-over-sims-social-copyright-infringement probably being the main case anyone would look at, and look how long ago that was. That said this last year or so has seen a few companies take on mobile game developers
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ringement-in-rules-of-survival-and-knives-out so who knows.
Golden Mushroom also appear to have erroneously assumed they did have some rights to the actual art/whatever of the original game (and whatever is out there from the cancelled sequel).
If Piko Interactive were blocked in a given country they would still be able to use all the art, code, layouts... they have from their purchase in a game they called Glove man 2 or something. If the blocked countries were significant many would then opt to instead change the name in all territories but that is a different discussion. They would also be able to sell the ROM on whatever service they like, though they might have to change the name/title screen in some places. Whether in those blocked places they would be allowed to say "originally released as Glover" I do not know.
