So it seems Bad Dragon has a new trick up their sleeve of sleazy business practices: Trademark trolling and questionable legal threats.
The story begins with a furry named Kharnak and his
dildo design, "Chimera", which was apparently
submitted to Bad Dragon through their forums. The thread seems to be heavily censored, thanks to Bad Dragon's forum moderation practices (which, you may recall, seem to be "remove anything remotely negative"), but from what I can tell, the design was pretty much ignored by the company and Kharnak was invited to submit it to the "Bad Dragon Labs" system when it launched, which didn't happen until earlier this year.
Months after Bad Dragon told him to submit the design to the "lab" program, Bad Dragon
trademarked the word "Chimera" for use on "Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, artificial penises, artificial vaginas". This was before Kharnak launched a
crowdfunding campaign to produce the Chimera and some other dong designs himself. Within the past few weeks now, Bad Dragon has begun selling an
"Experimental" toy using the name, with a design that seems to be based on Kharnak's original concept.
Not only did Bad Dragon lift the design and name, they
issued legal threats against the Offbeatr campaign, which ultimately forced Kharnak to refund all the money he received through it. This obviously upset Kharnak to the point he now seems to believe FurAffinity is some sort of authority on copyright and he now is
expecting FA to explain to him how to file a DMCA request and... other stuff that I can't quite figure out. I'll be honest, his incoherent posts don't really help his situation.
What's interesting about Bad Dragon's trademark of the name is that Bad Dragon has also applied for
other trademarks, some of which include their signature "
Cum Lube" and "
Cum Tube", things that you'd think they'd want to trademark, but abandoned the applications after a while. In fact, only a handful of their products have active trademarks. This certainly does not help their situation, either, as it makes it look like they did indeed target this guy.
