Trademarks must be vigorously defended in the United States or you risk losing them. Not copyright, copyright you retain regardless of your desire to use it.

In this way, Trademarks are actually a bit more sane as they require the company to invest a little bit of effort and time in order to maintain them. Let it sit on a shelf, or be neglectful and you lose your right to it if someone else starts extracting some value from the item. It is this way because you can Trademark some seemingly generic terms and keeps people from just trademarking everything in the dictionary (for what, $200 registration?) and then suing everyone.

So, back to Activision.

They own trademarks on Starcraft, and World of Warcraft. Someone comes along and makes a game called World of Starcraft. A mashup of two trademarks which is built on products sold by the company that owns the aforementioned trademarks.

It is incredibly easy to imagine that if a person were to come across this mod or its website that someone would consider the connection between the brand Starcraft, and the brand Warcraft. In fact, that WAS the literal intention of the creator of this mod. His goal in choosing the name was to link Starcraft, and World of Warcraft.

So, in this legal system where you have to vigorously defend your trademark or lose it. You have someone which clearly used two trademarked names in the promotion of his product. If the lawyers DIDN'T respond to this they wouldn't be doing their jobs.

Now, perhaps they could have been a bit more clear in their C&D, but that would open them up to liability. How you ask? What if they said:

"Stop using these trademarked terms until you get permission to use them"

A hell of a lot nicer yes? Except that it could imply that they might be granted permission. If they go through the hassle of trying to request permission, only to find that there is some policy in place that prohibits granting permission to use the trademarks to entities such as themselves then they may have grounds, however slim, to suggest that Activision was simply dicking them around and wasting their time/money. Waste someone's time and money like that and you have the potential for a lawsuit.

So, A Cease and Desist letter is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect when using trademarks in an unauthorized fashion.

Had they called their mod "Our New MMO" and they received a Cease and Desist, I'd consider it outrageous, but as it is, they should have expected one.

Not that much of an impressive "mod".
I see nearly no creativity in his work and I'm still wondering why a gaming company actually offered this guy a job.
Mostly anyone knowing his way just above average in the editor could've made this, imho.

Quote from payne

Not that much of an impressive "mod".
I see nearly no creativity in his work and I'm still wondering why a gaming company actually offered this guy a job.
Mostly anyone knowing his way just above average in the editor could've made this, imho.

Having the technical skills required to do something, and having the vision, drive and dogged patience to actually carry through and implement the vision is quite different.

This should be evident by the number of stalled maps on this site.

I see nearly no creativity in his work and I'm still wondering why a gaming company actually offered this guy a job.

Some guy working for Blizzard's management sees the video and/or a poorly written article and thinks something like: "omg. someone uses our trademark titles to make an own product. I need to report that!".
Then other people watch it and with the changed GUI and camera angles and the people may didn't identify Starcraft 2 in that anymore. So they download the video (maybe), contact youtube to delete the video and did more research about that.
As far as I know the creator had to be contacted to make Blizzard's staff understand that everything was a sc2 map only!

If Blizzard wants to make World of StarCraft in 5 years they'll have an issue if this mod gets big.

As far as I'm concerned this is a complete (and terribly pathetic and self-serving) fabrication. Feel free to cite something that shows you aren't talking out of your ass.

If Blizzard wants to make World of StarCraft in 5 years they'll have an issue if this mod gets big.

...Feel free to cite something that shows you aren't talking out of your ass.

Earlier this week, a player-made StarCraft II mod called World of StarCraft and described as a “StarCraft MMO” was featured on a number of prominent gaming news sites, catching the attention of gamers as well as our own. With the name so closely resembling that of World of Warcraft, we wanted to discuss the title of the mod with the developer, and as part of our routine procedure, we contacted YouTube to request the video be removed while that discussion took place. We were also curious about the project and wanted to discuss with the developer what the mod entailed.