On June 5, Sony filed a notice of opposition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office against a trademark application by a small Hong Kong-based app developer. The reason? Naughty Cat Co., Limited, the App Store developer in question, was in the process of applying to trademark the name "Naughty Cat."
This otherwise simple trademark application is now subject to Sony's legal team, as the company alleges the name "Naughty Cat" is too similar to Sony's game development studio, Naughty Dog.
To Sony, the age-old debate about which pet is superior just doesn't exist (and it shouldn't; the answer is cats), because it's just too hard to spot any differences between the two. But whether that will hold up at the U.S. Patent Office or not may require a deeper look into Sony's reasoning.
Naughty Dog vs. Naughty Cat: what you need to know
Naughty Cat only has two apps listed on the App Store, and both are gambling games that promise real cash rewards. We're not talking about a AAA game developer here, just your run-of-the-mill app developer.
On the other hand, Naughty Dog is a video game developer founded in 1984 and is responsible for some of the most well-known Sony game franchises ever. From Crash Bandicoot, to Jak and Daxter, to the Uncharted series and, of course, The Last of Us, many of Sony's most enduring exclusive game titles have been created by the Naughty Dog studio.
As you'd expect, Sony is rather protective of its trademarks, Naughty Dog being one of many, especially one relating to a first-party game studio for PlayStation consoles.
Sony's argument for opposing Naughty Cat's trademark registration, according to documents reviewed by IGN, states that the "Naughty Cat trademark is 'confusingly similar to the Naughty Dog trademark' it owns in overall commercial impression and connotation.”
Sony does not have a trademark registered for the word "naughty," likely because you can't trademark random words. The US Patent and Trademark Office requires that a word or phrase has to "indicate the source of your goods and services." So you can trademark Sony, PlayStation, and Naughty Dog, but not the word "Naughty" alone.
Regardless, Sony alleges that Naughty Cat's trademark construction is too similar. "The first, dominant element of the two marks, NAUGHTY, is identical," Sony claims in its filing.
“The second elements, DOG and CAT, are highly similar in that both refer to house pets and are likely to mislead consumers into believing, mistakenly, that Naughty Cat is affiliated with SIE [Sony Interactive Entertainment] and/or Naughty Dog or that its goods are licensed or approved by SIE and/or Naughty Dog.”
What this legal dispute means for gamers
Sometimes, legal filings are absurd. This is one of those times.
Regardless of whether or not Sony wins out in this trademark opposition, it's unlikely to impact gamers much.
If you do play one of Naughty Cat's two games (Cash Trip: Solitaire & Bingo and Bubble Bravo - Win Real Cash), you probably didn't even register the name of the app developer when you downloaded the game. So if Naughty Cat has to change its name, very few people are likely to notice.
Sony's argument that the two trademarks are too similar because they use the word "naughty" before an animal name is a bit much. Not a single person has looked at my cat and said, "That's a good dog."
T.S. Elliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats even jokes about it. In the "Ad-dressing of Cats," Elliot writes, "How would you ad-dress a Cat?/ So first, your memory I'll job,/ And say: A CAT IS NOT A DOG." This joke even made it into the musical Cats, in the final song of the show.
It's beyond understatement. The comedy is that it's just facts.
Perhaps the most compelling argument Sony could form about possible confusion between the two lies in its own behaviour: claiming to be a Naughty Dog while acting so catty. Meow.
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