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Coleco strong-arming homebrew publishers and fan sites


TPR

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But wouldn't that be an easy fix to remove from the printing plans?

 

From the thingverse site:

"May 2018 TRYING TO WORK OUT THINGS WITH THE DMCA NOTICE - FILES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL THEN"

Either they comply or they don't. I don't know how much warning they were given by CHL before the takedown occurred.

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Whatshisname sold repro GI Joe parts, didn't he?

 

And quickly sold them for much lower than his initial asking price after the knowledge got out there that he was doing it; clearly an attempt to get them sold and off the listings quickly and sweep his own wrongdoings under the rug.

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I imagine it's expensive and time consuming to fight these things, so patent/copyright trolls win by default.

 

THIS! Some people just won't bother to fight it because they A. Don't realize they can and would WIN, B. Just don't have the time or patience to fight it, or C. Some of the social platforms make it difficult to fight and people just don't bother or give up.

 

There are people who make erroneous copyright claims on YouTube videos that they don't actually own and squat on those videos and collect advertising dollars because people don't realize they can fight it. I've had some of these companies try to do it on our channel and I immediately dispute it and 100% of the time we have won those rights back.

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I wish there were a way to make DMCA takedown requests a bit more burdensome on the claimant. Cloaca has nothing to lose by slinging these around every time they see their trademark name being used without their permission. What happened to Cardillo's "hey pick up the phone let's talk about this" approach he claimed he would take with fans?

 

Seems the penalty for misrepresenting a claim is "actual damages plus court and attorney fees." In the case of the Thingverse people, I would think most people are posting stuff for free, in their spare time, as a hobby. So there's no "damages" to award.

 

Makes me want to buy up a bunch of brands as a group, just to give them away to the community. What do you suppose Cardillo's price would be to go away?

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I wish there were a way to make DMCA takedown requests a bit more burdensome on the claimant. Cloaca has nothing to lose by slinging these around every time they see their trademark name being used without their permission. What happened to Cardillo's "hey pick up the phone let's talk about this" approach he claimed he would take with fans?

 

Seems the penalty for misrepresenting a claim is "actual damages plus court and attorney fees." In the case of the Thingverse people, I would think most people are posting stuff for free, in their spare time, as a hobby. So there's no "damages" to award.

 

Makes me want to buy up a bunch of brands as a group, just to give them away to the community. What do you suppose Cardillo's price would be to go away?

 

His asking price would be too damn high because that moron has delusions of grandeur about how much money there is to be made in a niche market (the very market he alienated).

Edited by DuggerVideoGames
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His asking price would be too damn high because that moron has delusions of grandeur about how much money there is to be made in a niche market (the very market he alienated).

 

Even after several years of humiliating failure, and relentless cyberbullying? No one going to his events or buying his ill-conceived crap? I can't see the value of this brand going UP, only down.

 

  • The Coleco Chameleon was developed by a third-party licensee who was responsible for all aspects of the development. We terminated our relationship with that licensee once it became clear the product was not living up to the Coleco name.

    Last updated: Tue, May 8 2018 12:21 PM EDT
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Even after several years of humiliating failure, and relentless cyberbullying? No one going to his events or buying his ill-conceived crap? I can't see the value of this brand going UP, only down.

 

 

Agreed 100%. You know it and I know it; unfortunately, simpletons like him do not know it (or he does and just refuses to believe it).

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I wish there were a way to make DMCA takedown requests a bit more burdensome on the claimant. Cloaca has nothing to lose by slinging these around every time they see their trademark name being used without their permission. What happened to Cardillo's "hey pick up the phone let's talk about this" approach he claimed he would take with fans?

 

Seems the penalty for misrepresenting a claim is "actual damages plus court and attorney fees." In the case of the Thingverse people, I would think most people are posting stuff for free, in their spare time, as a hobby. So there's no "damages" to award.

 

Makes me want to buy up a bunch of brands as a group, just to give them away to the community. What do you suppose Cardillo's price would be to go away?

We've seen him worm out of making "knowingly misrepresented" claims before, by saying things were a typo or unwitting mistake, like saying Colitus was releasing Sydney Hunter - releasing their first new game in 30 years.

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The best thing we can do as a community is to tag any publicity from Chris & Co with this thread so people can get up to speed about their antics - the fact that this whole "empire" rests on a one-off home brew device that they misrepresented as their own market product to have their trademark registered is the kind of ass-hatery that deserves to be known.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Doubtful but they might have the molds for the Coleco tabletops. And they are planning replacement parts.

Technically Hasbro would still have the copyrights for those molds as they were selling them after they bought Coleco for a few years

 

Hasbro is still hosting the manuals for those tabletops

Edited by enoofu
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I don't think the shapes of these things are copyrightable. They may have been patented but that would have expired. Anyone, including Coleco Holdings, can make these cases. The artwork on the original cases could have copyright that might still belong to hasbro, nintendo, namco, etc.

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Never owned one of these myself, but I was aged around 10 when these were released, so I was the target audience. I had the Entex Space Invaders (crap) and PacMan 2 (great). PacMan 2 had a two player mode to control the ghost, head to head. I've still got the PacMan 2 from 1981, it works, but cosmetically challenged! A few of my friends did have Coleco PacMan, Frogger and Donkey Kong, so i did get to play them at that time as well.

 

There's no way they can enforce a take down on a replacement part for anything, unless it has the trademarked logo on there, which they seem to have obtained by fraudulent means in the first place. They don't own that product, like they don't own any of the games and peripherals created 30 years ago (although they're trying their best to deceive everyone, not in the know, into believing they do).

 

I own two Colecovision consoles, a roller controller, super action controller, expansion modules 1 and 2, multi-cart and 40+ carts, many boxed, so you'd say I'm quite a fan. I've read through this entire thread this week, it's like a super addictive sauce, and a great tragedy.

 

I'm really appalled at both how Eduardo (OpCode) has been treated by these leeches and how they've seemingly obtained the rights by citing, falsely, commercial usage on Ben Heck's one off custom Colecovision portable (he said so himself).

 

Ben's post: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/265739-coleco-strong-arming-homebrew-publishers-and-fan-sites/?p=3778557

 

I know it's not easy, but there must be some way of challenging this decision, considering there's hard documented evidence out there.

Coleco Expo with no Colecovison console, what a joke!

 

The sad thing is that I'd probably have been interested in owning a new reproduction of the originals, but certainly not the game choice on the Kickstarter and now that I've seen what they've been up to, there's no way I'd give them anything, however good it is.

Edited by bobstoned
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I literally just pledged and cancelled in order to post a comment. People have asked who is behind the game so I thought they'd like to know. Notice my old username, stardust4ever, and the "1 minute ago," "only backers can comment." I'm curious to see if my post stays up or not. Perhaps people could use this as a backdoor to expose Cardillo, but I don't want to place my KS account in jeprady so I kept it clean.

 

And yeah, spelled "bright" incorrectly, should have been "brite," LOL...

post-33189-0-94786500-1526903950_thumb.png

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I don't think the shapes of these things are copyrightable. They may have been patented but that would have expired. Anyone, including Coleco Holdings, can make these cases. The artwork on the original cases could have copyright that might still belong to hasbro, nintendo, namco, etc.

I think they can argue that the shape itself is a trademark; a few companies have done that in the past. Converse All Stars comes to mind: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chuck-taylor-lawsuit_n_5985358.html

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I think they can argue that the shape itself is a trademark; a few companies have done that in the past. Converse All Stars comes to mind: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chuck-taylor-lawsuit_n_5985358.html

The ruling with those shoes allow others to copy the style. Only the diamond pattern on the sole was protected.

 

https://consumerist.com/2016/06/24/converse-wins-trademark-battle-over-chuck-taylors-sole/

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I literally just pledged and cancelled in order to post a comment. People have asked who is behind the game so I thought they'd like to know. Notice my old username, stardust4ever, and the "1 minute ago," "only backers can comment." I'm curious to see if my post stays up or not. Perhaps people could use this as a backdoor to expose Cardillo, but I don't want to place my KS account in jeprady so I kept it clean.

 

And yeah, spelled "bright" incorrectly, should have been "brite," LOL...

 

Heh, that's pretty sneaky to contribute and then pull out. My KS is wired to my FB in a way that would tell all my friends I was supporting this thing if I pledged, so I'm not going to do the same. Wouldn't want to send the wrong message or inadvertently get someone excited about this dumb thing.

 

"Expose Cardillo?" I don't get it. There's nothing underhanded about this particular campaign, is there? Is Bob D not being compensated for his work on the new RB game?

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Wow ! ! ! ! !

 

So Cardillo and his cronies are at it again trying to use the Coleco Industries, Inc. Wikipedia article to promote themselves and to advertise their "shit" for want of a better word. A few minutes ago an anonymous user deleted ALL references in the article to the Retro VGS and added in a whole load of crap about their so-called Expo and quite incredibly a promotional piece about their new mini arcades along with a link to their Kickstarter! Where do I start? Not only was the language used totally inappropriate for Wikipedia (e.g. very much marketing hype) but companies are actively discouraged to edit articles where there may be a conflict of interest. In fact, the ColecoToys user (read this as Cardillo or one of his cronies) were warned in May 2017 by one of the Wikipedia "moderators" that their editing of this article may have a conflict of interest and recommended that they submit any changes to a Wikipedia editor for proofreading. Needless to say the ColecoToys account was only ever used once more.

 

Now they are simply using an anonymous account (shown as 2603:301B:21A3:8000:B04E:FAC8:EEBC:F191) to try and bypass this. Do they really think that Wikipedia editors haven't seen this behaviour before and know how to deal with it? Cardillo really is an idiot. Anyway, the change they made is shown below with the new text highlighted in blue replacing all of the Retro VGS related text.

 

post-5757-0-88903200-1526939360_thumb.png

 

Apart from their gall at trying to make these changes to the article when they have a clear conflict of interest, they also poured fuel on their fire of deceit and lies by adding the following text in the comment to their edit. The comment ends abruptly as they obviously didn't realise they had reached the character limit for comments. I'll leave you to react to this as appropriate.

 

"Coleco Statement- June 8, 2017 To Whom This May Concern, Recently our company, Coleco Holdings LLC (Coleco), has received a lot of criticism on the Internet based on a false statement by a blogger. Please note, Coleco DID NOT file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint against this blogger, or any other party. There is an important legal distinction between copyrights and trademarks, but the online commentary regarding this matter has confused this distinction, and s"

 

Anyway, it only took ONE MINUTE for another Wikipedia user to Undo their changes and put it back the way it was. Glad to know that I'm not the only one watching this article for vandalism.

 

Perhaps a coincidence, but yesterday an anonymous user from New Jersey vandalised the ColecoVision article, adding in the word "million" in the sentence describing the number of games available at launch. Needless to say I undid this.

Edited by Ikrananka
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