Developers take on Tim ‘Trademark Troll’ Langdell

I’m not the only one ranting this week. Developers (including myself) from my favourite developer forum, The Chaos Engine, have just issued a statement regarding the Tim Langdell vs Mobigames ‘Edge’ trademark dispute. You can read Develop’s summary of TCE’s press release here. TIGSource have also come out strongly against Tim’s actions and are even collating information on his background.

For those unaware, while Train2Game are dragging TIGA into problems in this case Tim is dragging the IGDA down with him through blatant patent trolling versus an independent developer. Tim is a board member on the IGDA, an organisation who are supposed to fight for developer causes. It’s the second time this year that the IGDA have run into a serious problem involving their own board members, Mike Capps having frustrated the development community with his comments on working hours.

What I find so interesting about what’s happened this week is that the big boys are starting to come up against organised opposition. This is despite being linked to the industry bodies who, in theory, should be the ones throwing their arms in the air (but aren’t, the IGDA in particular). This isn’t a few left wing anonymous students flaming on random forums, we’re talking about increasing numbers of frustrated and annoyed professionals who feel they are being poorly represented.

Even the industry press are starting to wake up, although I do wish the ‘regular’ gaming press would make more of these issues – just mentioning them would be a start. Simon Carless (Gamasutra editor) has had to deal with the very real legal and political issues that have resulted from public comment by Gamasutra. It may be a pain for him but in one sense it’s a good thing, honestly! It’s a sign that the industry press may be growing up and just perhaps we will have some real journalism rather than press releases, reviews, and tutorials.

So will this moral outrage make any difference? I don’t know but I do believe that it’s the right thing to do.

There are risks, however. I’ve had to make some judicious Train2Game edits on this blog, have been warned about discussing certain issues in public, and have also been warned by my lawyer not to get involved with MIS due to their highly litigious nature. Just last night MIS managed to get the T2G-critical DigitalTrend threads removed (plenty of web caches remain, however).

In such cases I’d like to see some proper critical and investigative journalism from our press, and I don’t mean the sort of tabloid stuff we tend to see from the BBC these days (but that’s another story).

EDIT: You can now donate to the Mobigames cause while IGN have also picked up on the story. Wouldn’t it be great if gamers and developers could unite?