“Trademark Troll” Tim Langdell Resurfaces, Targets French Studio Mobigame

The name Tim Langdell brings back unpleasant memories for many developers and lawyers in the video game industry. For nearly two decades, this former boss of British studio Edge Games filed lawsuit after lawsuit and issued threat after threat over the word "Edge", forcing Namco to rename Soul Edge to Soul Blade (before the Soulcalibur series existed), pushing Future Publishing to buy out the rights to the name for its Edge magazine, and even going after Electronic Arts over Mirror's Edge.

Now an ordained priest and palliative care chaplain, as well as the author of books on game design and virtual reality, Langdell has nevertheless just filed a new federal lawsuit in Virginia, this time against French studio Mobigame, creator of the puzzle-platformer EDGE released on iOS and PC. The game had already been pulled from the App Store back in 2009 under pressure from Langdell, before returning after EA succeeded in getting his trademarks cancelled in court.

"We have the means to fight this to the end," says Mobigame's CEO

In a public statement, Mobigame CEO David Papazian noted that his studio "has had to deal with Tim Langdell for over 17 years" and said it has the resources needed to see this fight through to the end, thanks in particular to the commercial success of Zombie Tsunami, downloaded more than 500 million times. According to him, Langdell's new lawsuit is based on an obscure 2003 J2ME version of the game Bobby Bearing, which he argues cannot possibly justify a trademark claim in the US, since the J2ME and BREW standards were never really compatible there.

Papazian explicitly ruled out any quiet, behind the scenes settlement, instead welcoming the upcoming discovery process and promising to publicly document every step of the case in order to "expose Tim Langdell for what he is: a trademark troll." As a reminder, the US trademarks "Edge", "Cutting Edge", "Gamer's Edge" and "The Edge" held by Langdell were already cancelled back in 2013 following a lawsuit brought by Electronic Arts.

Source: Time Extension