Wrestler Booker T Sues Activision For Copyright Infringement Over Fairly Generic Character Depiction

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It's old hat by now to point out that on matters of copyright far too many people are unaware of the nuances of the law as to what constitutes infringement and what doesn't. While this is generally true, it's all the more so when it comes to how copyright covers specific characters or settings. For instance, George Lucas may have a copyright claim on the specific character of Darth Vader, but he most certainly does not have any claim to the more generic black-armored space-magician with a laser sword and a bad attitude. Copyright covers expression, in other words, not mere ideas.Which brings us to ex-WWE wrestler Booker T and his lawsuit against Activision over a G.I. Bro character he created and a character in Black Ops 4.

Booker T. Huffman has filed a lawsuit against video game publisher Activision for allegedly stealing his “G.I Bro” character in the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 video game.Huffman filed a lawsuit today against Activision Publishing, Inc, Activision Blizzard, Inc., and Major League Gaming Corp.The lawsuit alleges that Booker T’s character G.I Bro was copied by the Black Ops character David “Prophet” Wilkes. Booker T used the G.I Bro character in the 90s as a professional wrestler, and also created a comic book based on the character in 2015.

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Appeals Court Takes No Time At All In Rejecting Patent Troll's Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Cloudflare

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You may recall that back in May of 2017, a patent trolling operation called Blackbird Technologies picked on the wrong internet company to troll. Having built up some success blasting frivolous lawsuits at other internet companies, it chose to go after Cloudflare. That was a mistake. Cloudflare didn't just hit back, it promised to destroy the patent trolling firm, Blackbird Technologies. It opened up a campaign to crowdsource prior art not just on the patent at issue in its lawsuit but on every patent that Blackbird Technology claimed to hold.Almost exactly a year ago, Cloudflare won its case with the court invalidating the patent. It was such an easy decision that it took US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria barely over a page explaining why the patent was so clearly invalid and the case was dismissed.Blackbird, for reasons that escape me, decided to appeal to the Federal Circuit. Now, we've spent the better part of two decades mocking the Federal Circuit and its history of nutty decisions, but there are some cases so obviously bad that even the CAFC can't fuck them up. This is one. A CAFC panel heard the case last week and found the situation so utterly stupid that it only took a few days for it to affirm the lower court ruling. Indeed, its ruling is even shorter than the district court's ruling. The CAFC opinion doesn't even say anything other than: "Affirmed."Ouch.According to Cloudflare's General Counsel, Doug Kramer, in a blog post on Cloudflare's site, the CAFC panel didn't have a single question for the company's lawyers (which is nearly unheard of), leaving him with tons of extra time:

A panel of three judges from that court heard arguments on the appeal last Friday, but didn't ask our attorney a single question about the substance of our argument on the abstractness of the patent. He sat down with almost half of his 15 minutes of argument time left because there was nothing more to say. Yesterday, just three business days after that hearing, the court affirmed the lower court's decision in summary fashion, which means they didn't even write about the claims or arguments, they just said Affirmed (see below).

Blackbird filed this case in March 16, 2017. For nearly two years, anyone doing due diligence on Cloudflare might have had questions about whether there was a cloud over our rights to our technology. And we had to go through a lot of briefing, and the related legal expenses, to get to this point. Blackbird's combined legal filings at the district court and appellate court amounted to more than 650 pages, our responsive briefs were more than 900 pages.The two courts spent less than two pages describing a result that was obvious to them, but it took us two years of uncertainty and cost to get there. Federal court litigation doesn't make anything easy. Even if Blackbird had won the case, it is not clear they would have been able to collect significant damages. Our allegedly infringing use was not a product or feature that we charged for or made money from - it was essentially posting interstitial messages for various errors. Even though we were able to win this case early in the legal process and keep our costs as low as possible, it's possible we spent more money resolving this matter than Blackbird would have been able to collect from us after trial.

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