Bethesda, Mojang settle 'Scrolls' trademark lawsuit

Minecraft developer Mojang and The Elder Scrolls house Bethesda are now back on friendly terms, as the two companies have settled the lawsuit over the "Scrolls" trademark. Mojang managing director Carl Manneh announced the settlement on the studio's blog on Friday. The agreement ends an eight-month tiff between the two high-profile, well-respected game developers. In August last year, Mojang founder Markus "Notch" Persson said Bethesda's lawyers filed a lawsuit against Mojang over the studio's next game, titled Scrolls (artwork pictured), slated to release this year. Bethesda accused Mojang of copyright infringement, and said consumers would confuse Mojang's tactical role-playing game Scrolls with Bethesda's November 2011 big-budget open world RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, both of which had fantasy themes. But the "Scrolls" conflict now appears to be over. "We have settled the lawsuit over Scrolls and Mojang and Bethesda are friends again," wrote Manneh. "To answer the big question -- yes Scrolls is still going to be called Scrolls. "To answer the second question -- we aren’t going to keep the trademark. For us this was never about a trademark, but being able to use 'Scrolls' as the name of our game, which we can -- Yey." Mojang told Gamasutra in September last year that the studio intended on fighting Bethesda over the trademark infringement accusation. "It is really silly believing our game will be confused with their FPS-RPG with realistic graphics," he said at the time. "They have dumped everything [into the lawsuit that] they could find about Scrolls. ... We are going to do as much as we can, since I really hate it how the big boys always get their own way."