King, the makers of phone game Candy Crush Saga, have been going on a trademark tear recently. If there is software which contains the word Candy or Saga in the title, they will initiate legal action, even though they have yet to gain the trademark for either word. The company says they are just trying to protect their intellectual property, and given that they are in the highly competitive and frequently shady mobile app market they're somewhat justified in trying to prevent competitors from getting their market.
However, the trademark applications have several issues. Even if we limit use of the word to games, Candy and Saga have been in use long before King ever dreamed of doing a candy-based puzzle title. Saga has been used since at least the mid-90s by Japanese developer Square, and board game Candy Land was adapted to Windows PCs in 1998, after existing in a traditional board game version since 1949. So already these very common words have been used by similar products long before King was even incorporated in 2003. This on its own should invalidate any attempt to try to trademark the words for the company's own use, given the pre-existing marks in question, but King has been pressing forward with their action anyway.
The other problem, the one that affects those of us who are not actually in the mobile gaming business, is what this means for the actual use of words. Take saga for example. The word comes from Icelandic, and while it's most commonly associated with tales of brave Vikings in large battles, it means story. Saga has it's own connotations - the recently released Banner Saga, one of the titles King objects to, trades on the association with Vikings being brave, telling a tale of intimidating bearded men roaming the wilderness - but even if taken on its own it still refers to some form of narrative.
Candy Crush Saga is hardly an epic narrative, or any narrative for that manner. There is candy, it gets crushed, people lose hours to a silly little casual game on their phones. One can create their own story using the power of their imagination if they so choose, but it's not very high on the list of priorities for either developer or player. Saga, in King's estimation, should be a word that identifies the King family of products - everything they make has the word appended to the end, no matter how little sense it makes - rather than the actual definition of saga as it has been for hundreds of years.
That is an impediment to language. Trademarking commonly used words like candy and saga just makes it difficult to use those words when referring to much else, no matter what their definition was beforehand. It's worse when such words are trademarked without any regard to their actual meaning or common usage. Whatever saga might have meant before, the meaning is discarded when it becomes just another bit of branding.
I don't blame King for wanting to protect their intellectual property, but the way they are going about it is dangerous, especially if a precedent is set. Words within the common usage should not be allowed to be trademarked and their dictionary definitions should not be subverted to allow them to become another flimsy bit of branding.
