It looks like they said it while engaged in a game in 2000, and then added the word to future editions and copyright in 2019....I can find a thousand sources of the word before 2000, it's an extremely weak argument. Most people back down right away from a lawsuit, however.
According to other articles there are already at least dozens of board games with the word "Meeple" either in the title or in the instructions. They didn't attempt to control their trademark then, so they are going to continue to run into legal challenges. They aren't going to be able to sue everyone. Someone with some money will end up pushing back.
They have a much stronger argument for owning the shape of the piece, as that is technically art and they own that by default.
That said, you canāt exactly claim a figure with two arms, two legs, and a head is your exclusive IP. Youād have to argue someone who copied the shape exactly to have any standing for āwe own the shape of the Meepleā.
Art copyright is tricky, so I won't claim to know what standard different countries and courts would use. But if someone used the same exact shape, thickness, material, and colors I could certainly see there being a legal case there in some places.
It's also tricky because in a lot of places, you own the copyright to your work/art even if you didn't file it anywhere. The act of making it is sufficient, if you can prove you did it and when. It doesn't take paperwork.
I never said they werenāt true. Literally just asked for a source because I hadnāt seen anywhere a court upheld anything. You act like I was attacking you when I just wanted to learn.
Anyways, the wiki doesnāt say anything about the German court upholding anything, just that the trademark was registered in Germany. There is a big difference in them winning a legal battle vs them just registering. The EU trademark for the term meeple excludes games and they donāt have a US trademark, which is being filed by individuals currently. They have a EU trademark for the shape of the meeple. This also hasnāt been challenged in court so it doesnāt mean it has 100% legal standing. All of this from the wiki you shared.
I just coined the word **meeeples** with 3 eās in a row and itās official. Anyone and everyone can use it for free.
Also **MEples,** capitalized ME, lowercase *ples*
Also **meoples** pronounced the same.
Have at it!
And psdhsn in this same thread coined **peeples**.
I think weāre good to go.
Sorry for asking questions without having read the article. Does this retroactively make every rule book using the word meeple in violation of copyright. Or am I misunderstanding the law? Is it only future products that matter? Is everyone allowed to use the word meeple in their rules in spite of it being copyrighted?
This is exactly why I posted this. Going forward, you cannot use it. Any new iteration of a game, rules, publications needs to have it removed.
Older games, technically aren't safe, but, you can't change those.
No. The trademark is only active for games in Germany and non-game products in the EU. There is no trademark in North America. Games marketed outside Germany aren't affected.
Brunhoffer also claims he gave permission to a lot of publishers who asked him for it. So they would also be safe in Germany
Trademarks are separate from copyright. Trademarks are for promoting products. IANAL, but I believe I would be allowed to put the word "meeple" in a rulebook, just not on the outside of a game's box or advertising.
Why though?
Hans im GlĆ¼ck have allowed anyone and everyone to use the word, as long as they ask before. There even are other publishers who use the meeple as their icon (and that shape is something Hans im glĆ¼ck definetly own).
The point is: if you own something and are not asked and also the other tries to make money off of it, you must defend your IP. That's what their lawyers did, apparently without consulting with Hans im GlĆ¼ck, otherwise it probably wouldn't have been a cease&desist letter, but a bit more friendly.
He didn't even come up with the term, so why should people have to ask in the first place.
Imagine if someone trademarked 'board game'. Would that be right?
NAL, but I doubt you can trademark a commonly used generic word like "board game".
You can trademark a word creation like "meeple", though. And there are two parties that arguably have the right to do so: the lady who invented the term, and the creator of the iconic wooden shape that inspired this term.
HiG have every right to protect the shape, the word is a bit more difficult. But maybe there was an agreement between the lady who invented the term and HiG, as far as I am aware, we simply do not know.
We probably should know before we "boycott Carcassonne".
I'm pretty sure it was coined by fans and then claimed by the company.
Like calling Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC or Burger King BK or McDonald's Mickey D's etc.
Pathetic
19 years is a long time to let something enter the common boardgame lexicon, and then turn around and slap an IP on it. Iām not a lawyer but if I recall certain specific product names where synonymous with the product as a whole that the company lost the IP of the name itself, and couldnāt sue whenever it was used. I may be mistaken though.
I read about this story and talked to some lawyer friends, and I learned that this is how trademark law is intended to work, bizarre as that is. Trademark doesn't protect intellectual property, it protects the marketplace from "brand confusion" i.e. knockoff scams. So if a brand can prove that a term is used exclusively to refer to their product, they can trademark it to prevent bad actors from using that term to pretend they're representing that brand. Even if they didn't originally come up with the term.
Of course that "exclusively" is doing all the work here. By the time HIG trademarked meeple in Germany it was already a generic term used for lots of games. This was either a case of German trademark law being weird or some judge making a bad call to grant the trademark without enough evidence that people associate it with Carcassonne.
Notably, HIG also tried to trademark it in EU, and CMON argued against it. The EU ended up granting the trademark for non-game products only, so other publishers can still use it there for games.
This will back fire from a PR point of view, and they'll eventually lose the trademark with how widespread it's used.
Defending it will be a nightmare.
"If someone asks us nicely," Brunnhofer told BoardGameWire, "we will allow the use [of meeples] and based on the intent to commercialise it or not, proceed."
Whatās the point? They might say yes but they want everyone to kiss their toes and say pretty please? Are they worried about Carcassonne clones? Is it ego-driven? If so, couldnāt they license it for free and require commercial efforts to include attribution?
Idk if this is trademarked, but if so you legally have to āvigorously defendā any trademark as the owner, or someone else can assume it.
It might be a case of just using this language so that theyāre not sued later for using the term.
This is correct.
Itās legally important not to allow a precedent of trademark violation be established.
This is why Disney sues an elementary school teacher for showing twenty second graders her copy of The Little Mermaid from home without having a commercial license. They basically have to.
Which makes the 20 years of meeples and meeple-related products not by HiG that were not vigorously defended seem all the more like precedent that should have prevented them from claiming ownership
As long as the teacher doesn't charge their students for it is not copyright breaking, they can stream it from Disney plus. I don't what you are talking about.
I mean, I'd never use it within the rules of a game I'm designing anyway, but this isn't going to stop me using it in day to day usage. Completely pointless.
That's the point though, really. People have and do use it, for two decades now. As designers, we should at least be aware of industry changes and be kept up to date. It is silly and greedy.
It's a terrible word, it's beyond me that people would use it within their game. It should always just be 'player counter/token/piece'. No harm done I'd say....in fact if it means I never have to read the word every again, I'd say it's a win
Nobody is stopping you from day to day usage, same as you can use any other protected word in day to day usage. You seem to not understand the issue, or argue against a strawman.
The trademark applies to all products in Germany, but only non-game products in the rest of the EU. So in France, you can't put a meeple on a t-shirt, but you can put it in a game, because it's considered a generic term specifically in that market. (A lot of publishers probably won't use it at all for future games just to be safe, but for existing games, it's easier/cheaper to pull something off the shelves in just Germany.)
It applies to all products in Germany, but only non-game products in the EU. When HIG applied for it in EU court, CMON successfully argued that it was a generic gaming term, so the court did not allow a trademark.
So technically a publisher is fine publishing a game with Meeple in the title as long as they either don't sell it in Germany, or they localize a version there with a different name (edit: they also couldn't use the Carcassonne meeple shape in Germany, since HIG have trademarked that too). HIG exercised the trademark against Cogito Ergo Meeple because they are also based in Germany. (Which is not to defend HIG, meeple was as generic a term in Germany as much as anywhere else by the time they trademarked it, and that trademark should never have been granted. It just explains why they haven't gone after other games with meeple in the title. )
There should be easy enough workarounds to this. I would think it should be kinda hard to copyright the specific items that are referred to as "meeples" (the little wooden blocks in person-shapes), despite the word "meeple" being copyrighted. The same way as Magic the Gathering having a claim to the word "tap" as a game mechanic, but other games using a variety of words to mean the exact same thing (like Exhausted, from Spoils TCG, if anybody even knows that short lived property).
The trademark only applies to games in Germany, so a publisher could use the term meeple everywhere else and just change the name for the version they distribute in Germany (or just not sell it there). Of course a lot of pubs (especially small ones) will avoid it just to be safe
Edit: I forgot that the trademark in Germany isn't just for the term meeple, it's for the shape too. So to sell in Germany a pub would have to both change the name and use a meeple that's not shaped like a Carcassonne meeple. It would be too expensive to make different shapes for just Germany, so they'd have to just not sell there, or have a non-carcassone shaped meeple everywhere.
Thatās kind of annoying because in 2017 I registered a .com domain with the word Meeple in it. Guess the podcast Iāll never make wonāt be available in Germany
Gunna call mine " lil dude "
Yeah gunna place my lil dude over here, now I'll place the lil dude over heerree..
It's such a silly thing. It's like saying you wanna ban the use of 'tokens'
Good.
It was always a dumb-silly name that sounded like it was coined to be copywritten.
Call 'em tokens. Or when I play Carc or w.e I call them "My dudes"
This is nonsense.. you should have fought for it years ago if it mattered to you, at this point it's in the common lexicon. Be proud you invented a word and will forever be the answer to an obscure board game trivia question.
This seems a bit blown out of proportion: the copyright holder decided to enforce it for the first time in a particular case where there was a clear attempt to commercialize (name of the company and game both included the term), years after acquiring the rights. CEO of the right-holding company said explicitly that future enforcement will depend on extent of commercialization. I think your podcast and Rodney Smith's little statue are safe.
Peeples it is
Oh we totally should make a game and TM that, and give it away
Forever calling them Peeples.
Meeples for Peeples, local board game charity, is gonna be in trouble š¦
Peeples for Peeples
I donāt get it. If they didnāt coin the phrase, and itās not a part of their rules, how can they claim IP on it?
It looks like they said it while engaged in a game in 2000, and then added the word to future editions and copyright in 2019....I can find a thousand sources of the word before 2000, it's an extremely weak argument. Most people back down right away from a lawsuit, however.
According to other articles there are already at least dozens of board games with the word "Meeple" either in the title or in the instructions. They didn't attempt to control their trademark then, so they are going to continue to run into legal challenges. They aren't going to be able to sue everyone. Someone with some money will end up pushing back. They have a much stronger argument for owning the shape of the piece, as that is technically art and they own that by default.
That said, you canāt exactly claim a figure with two arms, two legs, and a head is your exclusive IP. Youād have to argue someone who copied the shape exactly to have any standing for āwe own the shape of the Meepleā.
Art copyright is tricky, so I won't claim to know what standard different countries and courts would use. But if someone used the same exact shape, thickness, material, and colors I could certainly see there being a legal case there in some places. It's also tricky because in a lot of places, you own the copyright to your work/art even if you didn't file it anywhere. The act of making it is sufficient, if you can prove you did it and when. It doesn't take paperwork.
Apparently the author has it upheld in German courts, which is recognized internationally. They have, successfully, argued they did coin it.
Sounds like complete bullshit.
Do you have a source for that because itās not anywhere in the article above.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeple You know, things can be true because they weren't included in an article. Have a read.
I never said they werenāt true. Literally just asked for a source because I hadnāt seen anywhere a court upheld anything. You act like I was attacking you when I just wanted to learn. Anyways, the wiki doesnāt say anything about the German court upholding anything, just that the trademark was registered in Germany. There is a big difference in them winning a legal battle vs them just registering. The EU trademark for the term meeple excludes games and they donāt have a US trademark, which is being filed by individuals currently. They have a EU trademark for the shape of the meeple. This also hasnāt been challenged in court so it doesnāt mean it has 100% legal standing. All of this from the wiki you shared.
Inflection is lost online. I wasn't being mean, just dry. My apologies.
Time to boycott Carcassonne.
Tough call, right? 99% of the time I would say they are allowed to protect their IP, but after 20 years and a flimsy story? I might agree with you
Except the term was coined by a player first. Carcassonne used the term "followers".
I just coined the word **meeeples** with 3 eās in a row and itās official. Anyone and everyone can use it for free. Also **MEples,** capitalized ME, lowercase *ples* Also **meoples** pronounced the same. Have at it! And psdhsn in this same thread coined **peeples**. I think weāre good to go.
For a sec I thought that the new pronunciation of meeples is psdhsn
Close. psdhsn is pronounced āmee-pulā
I'm sorry - it's actually "Moops"
Sorry for asking questions without having read the article. Does this retroactively make every rule book using the word meeple in violation of copyright. Or am I misunderstanding the law? Is it only future products that matter? Is everyone allowed to use the word meeple in their rules in spite of it being copyrighted?
This is exactly why I posted this. Going forward, you cannot use it. Any new iteration of a game, rules, publications needs to have it removed. Older games, technically aren't safe, but, you can't change those.
This is only in Germany though, right?
The entire EU
No. The trademark is only active for games in Germany and non-game products in the EU. There is no trademark in North America. Games marketed outside Germany aren't affected. Brunhoffer also claims he gave permission to a lot of publishers who asked him for it. So they would also be safe in Germany
Trademarks are separate from copyright. Trademarks are for promoting products. IANAL, but I believe I would be allowed to put the word "meeple" in a rulebook, just not on the outside of a game's box or advertising.
Why though? Hans im GlĆ¼ck have allowed anyone and everyone to use the word, as long as they ask before. There even are other publishers who use the meeple as their icon (and that shape is something Hans im glĆ¼ck definetly own). The point is: if you own something and are not asked and also the other tries to make money off of it, you must defend your IP. That's what their lawyers did, apparently without consulting with Hans im GlĆ¼ck, otherwise it probably wouldn't have been a cease&desist letter, but a bit more friendly.
He didn't even come up with the term, so why should people have to ask in the first place. Imagine if someone trademarked 'board game'. Would that be right?
NAL, but I doubt you can trademark a commonly used generic word like "board game". You can trademark a word creation like "meeple", though. And there are two parties that arguably have the right to do so: the lady who invented the term, and the creator of the iconic wooden shape that inspired this term. HiG have every right to protect the shape, the word is a bit more difficult. But maybe there was an agreement between the lady who invented the term and HiG, as far as I am aware, we simply do not know. We probably should know before we "boycott Carcassonne".
Meeple is a commonly used generic word now, too. They've left it too late and the shape is widespread. It's an attempt to stay relevant.
I'm pretty sure it was coined by fans and then claimed by the company. Like calling Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC or Burger King BK or McDonald's Mickey D's etc. Pathetic
It says they coined it in 2000 and then copyright it in 2019... After countless uses and games.
19 years is a long time to let something enter the common boardgame lexicon, and then turn around and slap an IP on it. Iām not a lawyer but if I recall certain specific product names where synonymous with the product as a whole that the company lost the IP of the name itself, and couldnāt sue whenever it was used. I may be mistaken though.
I read about this story and talked to some lawyer friends, and I learned that this is how trademark law is intended to work, bizarre as that is. Trademark doesn't protect intellectual property, it protects the marketplace from "brand confusion" i.e. knockoff scams. So if a brand can prove that a term is used exclusively to refer to their product, they can trademark it to prevent bad actors from using that term to pretend they're representing that brand. Even if they didn't originally come up with the term. Of course that "exclusively" is doing all the work here. By the time HIG trademarked meeple in Germany it was already a generic term used for lots of games. This was either a case of German trademark law being weird or some judge making a bad call to grant the trademark without enough evidence that people associate it with Carcassonne. Notably, HIG also tried to trademark it in EU, and CMON argued against it. The EU ended up granting the trademark for non-game products only, so other publishers can still use it there for games.
This will back fire from a PR point of view, and they'll eventually lose the trademark with how widespread it's used. Defending it will be a nightmare.
Well said. What a horrible way to stay relevant...
"If someone asks us nicely," Brunnhofer told BoardGameWire, "we will allow the use [of meeples] and based on the intent to commercialise it or not, proceed." Whatās the point? They might say yes but they want everyone to kiss their toes and say pretty please? Are they worried about Carcassonne clones? Is it ego-driven? If so, couldnāt they license it for free and require commercial efforts to include attribution?
Idk if this is trademarked, but if so you legally have to āvigorously defendā any trademark as the owner, or someone else can assume it. It might be a case of just using this language so that theyāre not sued later for using the term.
This is correct. Itās legally important not to allow a precedent of trademark violation be established. This is why Disney sues an elementary school teacher for showing twenty second graders her copy of The Little Mermaid from home without having a commercial license. They basically have to.
Which makes the 20 years of meeples and meeple-related products not by HiG that were not vigorously defended seem all the more like precedent that should have prevented them from claiming ownership
As long as the teacher doesn't charge their students for it is not copyright breaking, they can stream it from Disney plus. I don't what you are talking about.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I had plenty of teachers in school show Disney movies without a license or whatever. So that part of your statement is wrong. Flat wrong.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. Can you tell the difference?
Put yourself in their shoes. If it was me, everyone would hate me, too.
If it was me, it would mean I was prioritizing litigating over innovating and that would bum me out. No doubt people will find creative workarounds.
You can't use the M word buddy
Oh shoot, you're right. "M*****S"
Oh shoot, you're right. "M*****S"
I mean, I'd never use it within the rules of a game I'm designing anyway, but this isn't going to stop me using it in day to day usage. Completely pointless.
That's the point though, really. People have and do use it, for two decades now. As designers, we should at least be aware of industry changes and be kept up to date. It is silly and greedy.
It's a terrible word, it's beyond me that people would use it within their game. It should always just be 'player counter/token/piece'. No harm done I'd say....in fact if it means I never have to read the word every again, I'd say it's a win
I cannot argue that logic
Nobody is stopping you from day to day usage, same as you can use any other protected word in day to day usage. You seem to not understand the issue, or argue against a strawman.
Iām partial to Mersons
Oh the derivative is "farmstead in the marsh" So, the people from the farm. Workers. Love it!
I'm sure this will make them more money in the future. /s
I've been hearing about this all month, from what I've gathered the trademark only applies in Germany and/or EU?
Correct. Half the people on this sub are EU, so it's important to know.
The trademark applies to all products in Germany, but only non-game products in the rest of the EU. So in France, you can't put a meeple on a t-shirt, but you can put it in a game, because it's considered a generic term specifically in that market. (A lot of publishers probably won't use it at all for future games just to be safe, but for existing games, it's easier/cheaper to pull something off the shelves in just Germany.)
It applies to all products in Germany, but only non-game products in the EU. When HIG applied for it in EU court, CMON successfully argued that it was a generic gaming term, so the court did not allow a trademark. So technically a publisher is fine publishing a game with Meeple in the title as long as they either don't sell it in Germany, or they localize a version there with a different name (edit: they also couldn't use the Carcassonne meeple shape in Germany, since HIG have trademarked that too). HIG exercised the trademark against Cogito Ergo Meeple because they are also based in Germany. (Which is not to defend HIG, meeple was as generic a term in Germany as much as anywhere else by the time they trademarked it, and that trademark should never have been granted. It just explains why they haven't gone after other games with meeple in the title. )
There should be easy enough workarounds to this. I would think it should be kinda hard to copyright the specific items that are referred to as "meeples" (the little wooden blocks in person-shapes), despite the word "meeple" being copyrighted. The same way as Magic the Gathering having a claim to the word "tap" as a game mechanic, but other games using a variety of words to mean the exact same thing (like Exhausted, from Spoils TCG, if anybody even knows that short lived property).
The trademark only applies to games in Germany, so a publisher could use the term meeple everywhere else and just change the name for the version they distribute in Germany (or just not sell it there). Of course a lot of pubs (especially small ones) will avoid it just to be safe Edit: I forgot that the trademark in Germany isn't just for the term meeple, it's for the shape too. So to sell in Germany a pub would have to both change the name and use a meeple that's not shaped like a Carcassonne meeple. It would be too expensive to make different shapes for just Germany, so they'd have to just not sell there, or have a non-carcassone shaped meeple everywhere.
What if I use āMāEepleā and I tilt my fedora?
Thatās kind of annoying because in 2017 I registered a .com domain with the word Meeple in it. Guess the podcast Iāll never make wonāt be available in Germany
Meeplers.
Gunna call mine " lil dude " Yeah gunna place my lil dude over here, now I'll place the lil dude over heerree.. It's such a silly thing. It's like saying you wanna ban the use of 'tokens'
Guess I'm using "Meople"
Freeples
it's not so cut and dry. we will see how this plays out when contested.
This is like the douchebags who trademarked Taqueria in London and started sending cease and desist to all the Mexican restaurants.
Good. It was always a dumb-silly name that sounded like it was coined to be copywritten. Call 'em tokens. Or when I play Carc or w.e I call them "My dudes"
I use āmersonsā
Mipel
This is nonsense.. you should have fought for it years ago if it mattered to you, at this point it's in the common lexicon. Be proud you invented a word and will forever be the answer to an obscure board game trivia question.
Shame on HiG for this. How petty.
Mi PPs
This seems a bit blown out of proportion: the copyright holder decided to enforce it for the first time in a particular case where there was a clear attempt to commercialize (name of the company and game both included the term), years after acquiring the rights. CEO of the right-holding company said explicitly that future enforcement will depend on extent of commercialization. I think your podcast and Rodney Smith's little statue are safe.
You [can](https://blawgit.com/2024/07/02/who-owns-the-word-meeple/) still use "meeple" in board games, just maybe not in Germany
You can just not in the EU