A small film production company youâve never heard of called Stellarblade is suing Sony and Shift Up over the use of Stellar Blade in this yearâs hit action-adventure.
Itâs easy to read that opening line, assume itâs one of those opportunistic cases that follows any successful IP (âI once wrote down the idea for a man with the power of spiders on the back of a napkin!â), and roll your eyes. But in the case of Stellarblade Vs. Stellar Blade, as I demand all legal documents must write it, things are a little bit more nuanced.
Trademark law is boring and tedious, but one of the elements that is frequently forgotten whenever cases like this come up is that if you want to keep your trademark, you have to defend it. If you want to know what it feels like to watch your brandâs name get subsumed by others to the point where its individual identity is entirely lost, ask Escalator, Hovercraft, and Trampoline. If a company isnât seen to be vigorously defending its brand, it can lose the legal right to hold its trademarks.
So yeah, if I owned a film company called Stellarblade, and all of a sudden some vastly bigger corporation comes along and uses the term, destroying my chances of ever being found on Google, and forever having my business associated with a video game Iâve got nothing to do with, Iâd be pretty narked. I might not, however, consider overreaching to the point of wanting the already-released video game to be destroyed.
As reported by IGN, this is the predicament faced by Griffith Chambers Mehaffey, owner of the Louisiana film production company Stellar Blade for the last 14 years. Come the gameâs name change in 2022, when it switched from Project Eve to Stellar Blade, Mehaffey noticed his Google ranking had plummeted to nothing, and was quite understandably upset. He claims that it has cost him large amounts of money, and is putting his business in danger, having previously dominated the search term since he registered www.stellarblade.com in 2006.
However, Mehaffeyâs case does start to look a little more wobbly when you learn he didnât register his trademark until after Shift Up changed the name of its game to Stellar Blade, filing his trademark in 2023. He then, according to IGN, sent a cease and desist letter to Shift Up. But, again, copyright is assumed, not registered, and Iâm honestly glad Iâm not a lawyer because this whole area is a giant mess.
Things then get sillier when you look at the case Mehaffey is putting forward. That begins with claims that his companyâs logo is âconfusingly similarâ to Stellar Bladeâs (they look nothing alike), at which point thereâs the unfortunate echo of the years of endless trolling wrought by Tim Langdell and his attempts to own the word âEdge.â
But the ârequest for reliefâ is where things get really bizarre. According to IGN, the injunction asks that âShift Up and Sony be prevented from using Stellar Blade or any other name similar to it, as well as asking they hand over all materials in their possession with âStellar Bladeâ on them so Mehaffey and Stellarblade can destroy them.â
Yeah, thatâs…not going to happen. And as much as the SEO damage must truly hurt, itâs also hard to imagine that his owning âstellarblade.comâ hasnât proven at least somewhat advantageous, given the likelihood his website has probably received considerably more traffic, rather than less, in the last year or so. In any case, one thingâs for certain: the publicity this story has created means you now have heard of small film production company Stellarblade.
Weâve reached out to Mehaffey to ask about his motivations and intentions.
