Scrolls vs. Scrolls - Who

Is one of the industry's leading developers picking on the developer behind the ever so addicting, Minecraft? Bethesda has made contact with Minecraft developer Mojang, claiming that Mojang's next game which happens to be titled "Scrolls" is an infringement against Bethesda's popular Elder Scrolls series. Bethesda is citing that gamers will confuse their Elder Scrolls games including the yet to be released Skyrim with Mojang's Scrolls.

Mojang's Markus Persson responded over Twitter, posted a picture of the letter, and took to his blog to explain the letter and how he felt.

..."A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. I agree that the word “Scrolls” is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.

The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this."

Persson also said that he hopes this is only lawyers being lawyers and not Bethesda itself "pulling a Tim Langdell". Bethesda has asked that Mojang stop using the word, "Scrolls" or else they will face a lawsuit.

via Gamasutra and The World of Notch