Someone just pointed this out to me: Notice of Abandonment for Netrunner
I looked for a relevant discussion here but didn’t find anything
Huh, I hadn’t seen anything on this at all. I’m not even sure of the specific legal ramifications.
I believe as a trademark “Netrunner” has gone back and forth as an available trademark since the end of the FFG-era of Netrunner. Not sure if it was explicitly “abandoned” before or just not renewed.
I believe people noticed that it was recently picked up by WotC before the release of the Neon sets of Magic that was more futuristic and there was speculation (on Reddit, and probably StimStack) that there might be a WotC version of the game. It seems to me like they may have just wanted to keep their options open if those sets were wildly successful to spin off more products. And, now decided that they don’t want to bother with it anymore.
I looked into this three years ago when it expired, and the conclusion was that it’s trivially easy for them to revive the trademark and put you into legal issues, I don’t know if it being dead/abandoned (three years of no use) changes anything on that but it’s likely still possible for wotc to shutdown anyone using it, just more difficult
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