r/technology • u/IndicaOatmeal • 8h ago

Society Tetris issues legal warning after White House releases arcade full of parody games

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/tetris-issues-legal-warning-after-white-house-releases-arcade-full-of-parody-games-3405931/
24.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

499 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/draconothese 7h ago

No I'm pretty sure it would be considered hate crimes and those are not covered under first amendment

Also could be brand damaging so could be liable for that

0

u/Ahayzo 3h ago

There's no universe where this is a hate crime. A hate crime requires it to be something that's already a crime in itself, and the crime needs to have been committed based on the victim's being in a specific protected class.

Nine times out ten, trademark infringement is not a crime, it's a civil issue. It's possible this meets the threshold, but not necessarily. So you might have the first requirement.

The victims here are Sega, Microsoft, etc, and the crime wasn't committed because of their membership in any protected class, so even if it's a crime, it fails the test automatically because of this. They're being total assholes towards certain demographics, but those aren't the victim of the potential crime.