According to an update on the trademark page for Shenmue on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, SEGA has apparently lost the trademark to Shenmue in the U.S. The current status, which was updated today reads, “Registration cancelled because registrant did not file an acceptable declaration under Section 8.”
As DualShockers notes, Section 8 is “a regulation that requires a sworn declaration on the ‘continued use’ of a trademark or ‘excusable nonuse,’ to be provided between the 5th and 6th years and between the 9th and 10th years after the registration date. Since the trademark was registered in 2002, the second step wasn’t successfully completed.” It appears that SEGA didn’t submit the required declaration to retain the Shenmue trademark.
This doesn’t mean that SEGA has lost the rights to the Shenmue intellectual property but just the name itself. Theoretically, someone could create a game using the Shenmue name and apply for a trademark, but it would likely have to be very different than the Shenmue SEGA created.
It’s likely SEGA will resolve this issue relatively quickly, but it will be interesting to see what happens next. We’ll reach out to SEGA of America today to see what they have to say.
YS.Net quickly buys the trademark.
Problem Solved 🙂
I’ll echo a previous comment…. FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU%$#@*&!!!
From ‘Team Yu’ on Facebook:
It’s been a wild week for Shenmue news and speculation, but then it often is. Very rarely are things as they first appear, and all too frequently they get misrepresented and blown out of proportion. This week has been no different.
First came the discovery that a US trademark relating to Shenmue was cancelled on February 14th (http://trademarkia.com/shenmue-76539781.html). This was promptly misreported by almost every corner of the gaming media, from DualShockers to IGN, basing their stories on another trademark that was actually cancelled way back in 2009 (http://trademarkia.com/shenmue-75643558.html).
Check these dates for yourself at the links above and you’ll have already done more research than the professionals who get paid to write about this stuff.
The older cancellation was for trademarking the name Shenmue in relation to “computer game programs and prerecorded discs and ROMs for computer game programs” (ie, traditional videogames) while the newer cancellation was in relation to “entertainment services, namely, providing an online computer game.” By comparing these two categorizations, it’s highly probable that the recently cancelled trademark referred only to the aborted Shenmue Online MMORPG, which was first announced in August 2004, a month prior to this trademark’s application being published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Shenmue itself is more likely to have been covered by the other trademark, which was published in November 1999, a month before the game’s release in Japan. If so, then its cancellation five years ago is the story that websites are trying to present as news today. Makes you wonder what else they get wrong, doesn’t it?
But what do these cancellations mean?
In both instances the trademark was cancelled under Section 8, which has correctly been reported to mean that Sega failed to submit evidence within the trademark’s sixth year “showing current use of the mark” in connection with its registered purpose.
A six month grace period applies for late submissions, at a price, so cancellations are not immediate upon an unused trademark’s sixth anniversary.
The presence of Section 8 means the February 2014 cancellation of the “online computer game” trademark was inevitable, considering it was last registered (presumably as a precaution) in July 2007, when development of Shenmue Online had been only recently halted.
Meanwhile, Sega’s acknowledgement at E3 2008 that they had no plans for Shenmue III fits in with the cancellation of the “computer game programs” trademark the following January, over six and a half years since its last registration in April 2002.
So upon exploring the data, there is no story here. The cancellation of these trademarks only reflects what we already knew, and for better or worse, does not change the status quo in any way. The Shenmue Online trademark is of no modern relevance, and it would appear Sega has not reapplied for the main Shenmue trademark in the five years since its actual cancellation. If they ever decide to port the original games or produce Shenmue III, the trademark will probably not be published until shortly before their release, just as we’ve seen in the past.
On a side note to all this, it’s important to remember that trademarks and intellectual property are not the same thing. The availability of the Shenmue trademark does not enable other publishers to come along and resume Ryo Hazuki’s epic adventure with their own game. The characters, likenesses, story and assets of Shenmue are still the property of Sega, and the fact that no one has tried to capitalize on the name alone over the past half-decade illustrates what a pointless exercise that would be. A lawsuit-dodging distortion of Shenmue III’s premise is not the Shenmue III that people want. The onus remains on Sega to either greenlight the game themselves or transfer full rights to someone who will.
Once that decision is made, the US trademark cancelled in 2009 can be re-applied for. In Sega’s homeland, the Japanese trademark is still valid. So while some within the gaming press have chosen to paint Valentine’s Day as a massacre for the hopes and dreams of Shenmue fans, in reality we are no greater distance from Shenmue III than we were two weeks ago. Whatever distance that may be.
Which kind of leads into our second subject, because a new video promoting the launch of the PlayStation 4 in Japan has gotten people wondering if we are in fact a lot closer to a Shenmue announcement: http://youtu.be/IxMf5lMWqto
The video demonstrates the console’s networking features, and on more than one occasion we see the username “Ryo H” representing a player, as if Hazuki-san has finally traded in his Saturn for a current gen machine (rather than the future gen machine it was in 1986).
With Sony having expressed intentions to pursue the most requested third party titles from its #buildingthelist survey last year, in which Shenmue featured prominantly, hopes are high that Lan Di may soon get his comeuppance on the PS4. But does this video really tease a revival for the series on the PlayStation platform?
To Western viewers, “Ryo H” stands out immediately because it’s familiar to us in the context of Shenmue only. But this was a promotional video made by a Japanese company for a Japanese audience. In Japan, there is nothing conspicuous about the name and initial “Ryo H”. It’s common, it’s mundane; the perfect example of a generic online username. Likewise, if Nintendo of America had produced a video featuring the username “Alex K” we wouldn’t give it a second thought – it could be Alex Knight, or Alex Kelly, or Alex Kingston, who cares? But excited viewers in Japan may assume it to be hinting the return of another Sega franchise, having perhaps only ever known this partial English name in connection with Alex Kidd, hero of Miracle World.
So we don’t attach any significance to this video for now. We hope that in hindsight we can some day all point to “Ryo H” as a peculiar foreshadowing of things that were to come, but at the present moment we see no reason to treat this as anything more than a harmless homage at best, and most likely unrelated at all. It doesn’t mean we’re writing off the Sony solution – but like the trademark hullaballoo, we feel this is more of a red herring than a revelation about Shenmue’s current or future status.
As far as we’re concerned it’s all still to play for, so be sure to join your fellow gamers from around the world on March 3rd for the#SaveShenmue Tweetathon, and reach out to these companies and millions of their potential customers with your case for Shenmue’s resurrection at the March 19th postmortem or beyond: http://TeamYu.net/SaveShenmue