"Marvel Battles Role Players"

City of Heroes, an entry in the “massively multiplayer online game” category pioneered by Sony’s Everquest, allows its nearly 200,000 participants to “bring the world of comic books alive” by inventing characters and selecting names, costumes and powers for them; the characters then interact with other players’ characters. Some users choose to imitate established comic-book heroes in creating their characters. In November, comic-book publisher Marvel Entertainment sued the site’s proprietor. According to Marvel’s complaint (PDF, courtesy Electronic Frontier Foundation), “Defendants’ Creation Engine facilitates and, indeed, encourages players to create and utilize heroes that are nearly identical in name, appearance and characteristics to characters belonging to Marvel” and the site is responsible for “directly, contributorily and vicariously infringing upon Marvel copyrights and trademarks”. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, a veteran of online free-speech fights, counters: “Asking City of Heroes to police their users to ensure that they don’t replicate Marvel characters is like asking a school to police its students to make sure none of them show up for Halloween in a homemade Spider-Man costume.” (Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, Nov. 16; Fred von Lohmann, “Et tu, Marvel?”, Law.com, Dec. 3 (contemplating a future offense of “pretending without a license”)).