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NEWS: Court: Upper Deck Liable for Counterfeit Yu Gi Oh! Cards


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504NOSON2
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Joined: 28 Jul 2008
Posts: 647
Location: Body:Santa Barbara, CA ~ Heart:New Orleans, LA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:17 am Reply with quote
Well, I can definitely see the difference. Never collected cards myself, even back in middle school days during the Pokemon explosion. Oh, well.
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FeralKat



Joined: 06 Jan 2005
Posts: 402
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:30 am Reply with quote
How can a large, public company knowingly counterfeit? Confused This looks like a really bad oversight on Upperdeck's part.

At least, that's the way I see it. If anyone has any more details, I'd like to know.
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief


Joined: 28 Jul 2003
Posts: 1685
Location: Los Angeles, CA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:35 am Reply with quote
I just read through the entire motion. That's something I'd never recommend anyone do, and I sure didn't intend to read the whole thing but honestly, I recommend this one. It's just so brazen and cartoonishly incompetent, it's hilarious.

My favorite part is when Konami finds the counterfeits, seizes them, and sends a letter declaring the contract over... Upper Deck sends out a press release going, "Hey! We're still the official distributors!" and keeps right on selling 'em till Konami gets a court order.

Though the part where the Upper Deck guys see how janky the bootleg cards look that already went out and start screaming profanities at each other... that takes a close second. My god! These guys are also involved in like 7 other lawsuits right now, including with Aniplex. I'm gonna have to read 'em all!

http://www.iptrademarkattorney.com/reply-konami-undisputed-facts.pdf
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teh*darkness



Joined: 16 Feb 2007
Posts: 901
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 6:23 am Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:
I just read through the entire motion. That's something I'd never recommend anyone do, and I sure didn't intend to read the whole thing but honestly, I recommend this one. It's just so brazen and cartoonishly incompetent, it's hilarious.
http://www.iptrademarkattorney.com/reply-konami-undisputed-facts.pdf


Wow, I took your recommendation seriously, and just spent a little over an hour reading through the whole motion. That was rather enlightening, and facepalmingly hilarious. So many of Upper Deck's statements were blatant asides, mistruths and misdirections, I could barely believe that all their responses were written by actual legal counsel. There were spelling and punctuation errors all over the place in UD's texts, several instances of referencing "Konami" instead of "Upper Deck" and misspelling of partie's names. This won't end well for Upper Deck NV...
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angryrider



Joined: 29 Nov 2009
Posts: 18
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 9:23 am Reply with quote
Konami could've solved this problem when it released the game here in America. It's a freaking toy company! Why would they have some other company making its own goods in an inferior way?! The Japanese cards were made of sterner stuff.
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hikaru004



Joined: 15 Mar 2004
Posts: 2306
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 10:12 am Reply with quote
Japanese version had stronger fighters too IIRC. If you collected YuGiOh cards, you'd know this already. It's not new. It's just finally out in the open.
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luisedgarf



Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 670
Location: Guadalajara, Mexico
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:17 am Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:
I just read through the entire motion. That's something I'd never recommend anyone do, and I sure didn't intend to read the whole thing but honestly, I recommend this one. It's just so brazen and cartoonishly incompetent, it's hilarious.

My favorite part is when Konami finds the counterfeits, seizes them, and sends a letter declaring the contract over... Upper Deck sends out a press release going, "Hey! We're still the official distributors!" and keeps right on selling 'em till Konami gets a court order.


Maybe because Upper Deck is an American company and Konami a Japanese one and we know how many U.S. companies treats Japanese propierty because of, well, cultural reasons. (And one of the main reasons why many Japanese companies refuses to litigate in the States because U.S. judges are one-sided with the local companies.)
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Teriyaki Terrier



Joined: 26 Mar 2008
Posts: 5689
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:40 am Reply with quote
Pretty obvious, but this won't end well with Upper Deck. What a fine mess the company has gotten into.

Its actually surprizing how such a large company such as Upper Deck would do this to be honest. I sure wouldn't recomend doing this, since the chances of being caught were quite high.

Well Upper Deck, you got yourself into this mess, now you'll have to get yourself out of it. Just hope for Upper Deck's sake that they have a good lawyer. They'll need it for sure.

There is definitely a lesson to be learned here though.
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dangerwhat



Joined: 22 Jul 2007
Posts: 187
Location: Central Florida
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:54 am Reply with quote
Upper Deck should have known better I'd think -.-
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John Casey



Joined: 31 May 2009
Posts: 1853
Location: In My Angry Center
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 12:19 pm Reply with quote
Huh. It's weird, but in a strange sort of way, this doesn't surprise me one bit. Upper Deck cards always seemed really....cheap to me.

I don't really know how to put this....but when you buy Magic cards, or Yugioh cards, you can just sort of tell that the people involved put a bit of their heart and soul into them. But whenever I look at an Upper Deck baseball card, all I smell off of it is is cheap, whiskey-scented cologne the suits wear when they're counting money.
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l33tmeatwad



Joined: 29 Jun 2007
Posts: 70
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 12:33 pm Reply with quote
I don't get quite what's going on, are they basically doing this due to the Ultimate Rare card versions of regular rare cards (as shown in the image) that they produced to boost sales?
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egoist



Joined: 20 Jun 2008
Posts: 7762
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:32 pm Reply with quote
Upper Deck's ignorance is shining like a bright star nowadays, huh? I kind of regret having bought a few World of Warcraft cards from them just because of the rare tiger mount. I never got the damn mount though. Oh, well.
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mrgetalife



Joined: 06 Jul 2008
Posts: 60
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:44 pm Reply with quote
Woo Go Upperdeck. Hope they are able to litigate this for pennies. If Crunchyroll can pull millions for essentially what was piracy from its roots. Just image what a company with a legal team can do.

The Japanese need more lawyers. They only suck in International law because most of the population are so Xenophobic by nature.
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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6235
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 9:21 pm Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:
I just read through the entire motion. That's something I'd never recommend anyone do, and I sure didn't intend to read the whole thing but honestly, I recommend this one. It's just so brazen and cartoonishly incompetent, it's hilarious.

My favorite part is when Konami finds the counterfeits, seizes them, and sends a letter declaring the contract over... Upper Deck sends out a press release going, "Hey! We're still the official distributors!" and keeps right on selling 'em till Konami gets a court order.

Though the part where the Upper Deck guys see how janky the bootleg cards look that already went out and start screaming profanities at each other... that takes a close second. My god! These guys are also involved in like 7 other lawsuits right now, including with Aniplex. I'm gonna have to read 'em all!



http://www.iptrademarkattorney.com/reply-konami-undisputed-facts.pdf


GOTTA READ'EM ALL!

seriously though, you need to delve more into this on ANNcast. it would make an interesting topic.
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teh*darkness



Joined: 16 Feb 2007
Posts: 901
PostPosted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 3:19 am Reply with quote
l33tmeatwad wrote:
I don't get quite what's going on, are they basically doing this due to the Ultimate Rare card versions of regular rare cards (as shown in the image) that they produced to boost sales?


No, they're doing this because Upper Deck had no authorization to make more cards. What would boost sales is repackaging a deck of cards that isn't selling with an already printed Rare or Ult Rare card. What Upper Deck did was have a Chinese company print counterfeit cards, then shipped those counterfeits to Vintage, and Vintage repackaged decks with the counterfeit cards included, essentially devaluing authentic Rare and Ult Rare cards by creating a perceived increase in supply. This violated Upper Deck's binding LOI (Letter of Intent) with Konami, and Konami pulled the plug on them, meaning they had no legal grounds to continue selling cards, but they did anyway. And now they're in court because of it.

Teriyaki Terrier wrote:
Well Upper Deck, you got yourself into this mess, now you'll have to get yourself out of it. Just hope for Upper Deck's sake that they have a good lawyer. They'll need it for sure.


And no, Upper Deck doesn't need good lawyers. They need to pony up and take responsibility for what they did, not find a way to get off the hook.
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