A small film production company you’ve never heard of called Stellarblade is suing Sony and Shift Up over the use of Stellar Blade in this year’s hit action-adventure.
It’s easy to read that opening line, assume it’s one of those opportunistic cases that follows any successful IP (“I once wrote down the idea for a man with the power of spiders on the back of a napkin!”), 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 brand’s name get subsumed by others to the point where its individual identity is entirely lost, ask Escalator, Hovercraft, and Trampoline. If a company isn’t 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 I’ve got nothing to do with, I’d 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 game’s 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, Mehaffey’s case does start to look a little more wobbly when you learn he didn’t 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 I’m honestly glad I’m 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 company’s logo is “confusingly similar” to Stellar Blade’s (they look nothing alike), at which point there’s the unfortunate echo of the years of endless trolling wrought by Tim Langdell and his attempts to own the word “Edge.”
But the “request for relief” is where things get really bizarre. According to IGN, the injunction asks that “Shift 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 ‘Stellar Blade’ on them so Mehaffey and Stellarblade can destroy them.”
Yeah, that’s…not going to happen. And as much as the SEO damage must truly hurt, it’s also hard to imagine that his owning “stellarblade.com” hasn’t 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 thing’s for certain: the publicity this story has created means you now have heard of small film production company Stellarblade.
We’ve reached out to Mehaffey to ask about his motivations and intentions.
.