In 2013, 5TH Cell was sued by the creators of the Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat memes due to their unlicensed use in the series.
Inital Lawsuit[]
On April 22, 2013, Christopher Torres and Charles Schmidt, creators of the Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat internet videos, jointly sued 5TH Cell and Warner Bros. for both copyright and trademark infringement as they did not get the proper licenses or permission to use either character in the Scribblenauts series. Keyboard Cat had been included in every game since the 2009 original, while Nyan Cat was first introduced in Scribblenauts Unlimited in 2012.[1] At the time, both characters had been copyrighted (Keyboard Cat in 2010 and Nyan Cat in 2011); however, Torres and Schmidt's trademark applications were still pending. In a response posted to Pastebin, Torres stated that he first heard about Nyan Cat's inclusion in Scribblenauts Unlimited's debut trailer and had been "disrespected and snubbed" multiple times when he had tried to resolve the matter with 5TH Cell and Warner Bros. privately, leading to the public lawsuit.[2]
The lawsuit was settled in September 2013, with both Torres and Schmidt receiving an undisclosed amount of compensation for their characters, while Warner Bros. and 5th Cell becoming licensees of the Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat memes for use in later editions of the series.[3]
Consequences[]
Although Warner Bros. and 5th Cell became official licensees of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat following the lawsuit, the characters have not reappeared in any Scribblenauts games since the lawsuit. This is likely by choice rather than by any legal obligation. Additionally, since the lawsuit games have removed all internet memes previously included in the series, including ones 5TH Cell wasn't sued over, and ceased including new memes as well.
These changes have noticeably impacted Scribblenauts Unmasked, European releases of Scribblenauts Unlimited, The mobile release of Scribblenauts Unlimited, Scribblenauts Showdown, and the Scribblenauts Mega Pack. Additionally, a number of Unlimited's Starites, Starite Shards and Object Shards were renamed or had their descriptions edited in the Scribblenauts Mega Pack to remove references to memes.
Trivia[]
- “Internet memes” still appears as an available behavior type in Mega Pack's object editor, although it has no effect since all corresponding objects were removed.