Can gaming company Zynga successfully obtain trademark rights to all things ending in ville, the French word for a town or village?
Answering that question is a task facing two federal courts.
Before it launched its billion dollar IPO, the San Francisco-based tech company threatened to sue computer game makers for having product names containing the ‘ville’ suffix.
Rather than accede to Zynga’s demands, game makers in West Virginia and Texas preemptively sued Zynga for court declarations that their game names — Blingville and Dungeonville — do not infringe any of the company’s trademark rights.
