Roblox Sues Toy Company

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Hiya Cookie Tech,

Incase you haven’t heard the news, Roblox is back at it again. This time they’re suing a Hong Kong based tech-toymaker company called WowWee for their new toy line of collectible figurines called Avastars

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They said that they:

“copy the distinctive designs of [Roblox] avatars”

According to this lawsuit, the company Wowwee

“admittedly copied Roblox’s wildly successful avatar intellectual property to create and sell a line of physical dolls to exploit Roblox’s investment, creative efforts, and popularity in the marketplace for their own profit.”

Roblox Also Stated that it already has a deal with another company, (Jazwares LLC) to make avatar dolls, and WowWee never asked for a similar liscense

The lawsuit accused WowWee of

infringing Roblox’s copyrights and trademark rights, breaching its terms of use, and falsely advertising that the dolls were affiliated with Roblox. It asked the court to block sales of the dolls and requested an unspecified amount of money damages.

WowWee has responded saying:

Roblox’s allegations are “completely meritless” and that it “looks forward to vigorously defending its position, product, and brand.” The company also said it spent several weeks trying to resolve the dispute without litigation and had “voluntarily disassociated” the dolls from Roblox.

In my opinion. The figurines created by this company look quite similar to the Roblox avatars.
However I feel that Roblox has been trying to push out their rthro clothing and the fact that they’re now trying to defend their “classic clothing” seems a bit hypocritical.

What do you think of this? Please let me know as I am curious to hear what you guys think.

Thanks!

Sources:
Bloxy news twitter
Reuters: Roblox sues tech toymaker WowWee over avatar figurines

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This lawsuit is very interesting, especially taking the fact, to be fair this looks more similar to lego then anything else.

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Honestly, I think roblox is going to lose this big time, however you can see the relations of the “Woman” bodytype on roblox:

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It just seems as if it would be impossible to sue over this.

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I think I take this back, you can see the relation to the roblox build, however, I can see roblox having a hard time claiming this as their property as it’s something so broad.

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I believe the avatars are the Skyler avatars, introduced when roblox removed the gender requirements.

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However, roblox branding guidelines specifically state (not their words - I re-phrased it)

Users may use RTHRO avatars in game branding without request.

So, they kind of cancelled themselves out here, from what I understand.

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It’s hard to see how a company could claim this as their own property though, it’s something that seems quite universal.

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That’s true, but after doing some digging, I’ve found out roblox supplies a form to apply to commercialize their avatars

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I think that lego should be the only one suing this company.

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Lego doesn’t have a patent for their figures and actually can’t sue.

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To me these look nothing like Roblox avatars, I don’t get why they are sueing…

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I can see some resemblance.

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