Ubisoft tries to sue somethingawful.com
The real reason it's stupid is that they're suing Something Awful and not Dave "Chugworth Academy" Cheung.
To be fair, they aren't ACTUALLY suing them. They just sent a cease and desist order, more or less. "Take it off your site or we WILL sue you" they haven't actually pressed charges yet
Still pretty stupid... plus, they are making demands I don't think they are legally entitled to make, such as:
Not to mention that it's all moot since there has been no commercial exploitation, intentional or otherwise.
Took me a while to sift through all the forum posts to actually find the "offensive" image.
I'm pretty sure i've seen more offensive things in my life.
Still, not appropriate for most online communities. Fits in perfect at somethingawful.com.
I just find it especially funny that they would send a cease and desist to somethingawful at all. I mean...They have a section on their site dedicated to legal threats. And how they laugh at people who attempt them.
As much as I would love to see SA get knocked on its collective ass, something tells me this isn't going to do it.
Well how are you suppose to find some ones name that posted the original picture?? Thats almost impossible. One person coulda made it, then another took it then another person took it and so on for the repeating process.
Since its the internet some people think that they can just take someones work and just say its theirs with no one knowing.
Also what are they gonna do with the persons name??? They gonna sue them? If someone asked you for your contact information address and shit, I wouldn't give it to them lol... My mom crys when I say what city I live in....
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Actually, Ubisoft is French. Their HQ is in France. And the studio that made Assassin's Creed is in Canada. Montreal, I believe.
And they're not really going to sue anyone. This is public relations damage control. Like Player1 said, Ubisoft purposely promoted Jade as a way to get more attention for Assassin's Creed, and now it has backfired. The comic in question -- which fits right in at somethingawful because it's aimed at the lowest common denominator -- was simply the most visible/offensive part of a larger backlash.
Ubi will be fine, of course. It's a corporation, after all. As long as it makes money nothing really can hurt it. This is a pretty terrible thing for Jade to have to go through, but hopefully she'll be able to learn from it and move on.
Answer: In 1998, Congress passed the On-Line Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) in an effort to protect service providers on the Internet from liability for the activities of its users. Codified as section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), this new law exempts on-line service providers that meet the criteria set forth in the safe harbor provisions from claims of copyright infringement made against them that result from the conduct of their customers. These safe harbor provisions are designed to shelter service providers from the infringing activities of their customers. If a service provider qualifies for the safe harbor exemption, only the individual infringing customer are liable for monetary damages; the service provider's network through which they engaged in the alleged activities is not liable.