A Trademark Troll is a term applied to someone who makes money by relying on the revenue from legal action that they take against anyone creating something that they can link to one of their registered trademarks without really providing anything of any value. This can be a lucrative course of action with some people seeming to make whole careers out of this and is particularly rampant in the technology industry.
Most recently, Markus ‘Notch’ Pearson, creator of the runaway success Minecraft, has reported that his recently minted development studio, Mojang, has received a letter from the lawyers of Bethesda concerning a trademark infringement. Mojang’s in-development title “Scrolls“, according to Bethesda, is too similar to their long running RPG series, “The Elder Scrolls”, better known to gamers as Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and the upcoming Skyrim which should be released in November.
The argument is that the name Scrolls could confuse gamers into thinking that it’s associated with Bethesda’s series. If successful, it would mean that Bethesda would essentially own the word scrolls. Based on legal precedent, it seems unlikely that they will succeed.