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'Star Wars' Sabacc Game Lawsuit Is Resolved
Lucasfilm Ltd. won a dispute over the rights to the card game that plays a pivotal, if small, role in the greater Star Wars galaxy. The San Francisco federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California overseeing Lucasfilm's litigation with app maker Ren Ventures Ltd. has entered a stipulated judgment and permanent injunction in a dispute that centered on the rights to the game Sabacc. Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC v. Ren Ventures Ltd., 3:2017cv07249.
As part of the resolution of the case, Ren Ventures has agreed to pay $470,000 in damages after earlier this summer dropping its own claims to trademark claims to the name Sabacc.
Knowledge of Sabacc, a blackjack-line game where players try to get a hand as close as possible to positive or negative 23 without going over, had been limited to all but the most hardcore Star Wars fans until it was featured in a scene in this year's Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Then again, considering the movie's box office performance, perhaps Sabacc is still not quite the pop culture touchstone as, say, “the force” — or even Jar Jar Binks for that matter.)
Han Solo won the iconic Millennium Falcon spaceship by beating Lando Calrissian in a Sabacc game — a fact first noted in a draft screenplay for 1980's Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back and then again in the novelization of the film. A trilogy of novels about Calrissian published later explained the rules of the game.
Ren Ventures, which created a mobile app centered on the game and registered a “Sabacc” trademark, filed a lawsuit of its own against the film studio and the Denny's restaurant chain earlier this year. The suit, also filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claimed that a Sabacc-related promotion partnership between Lucasfilm and Denny's for the Solo movie violated the app makers' registered trademark.
But in an April 2008 ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg, who was overseeing the suits, found Lucasfilm had sufficiently shown its use of Sabacc marks predated the app maker's. “The crux of Lucasfilm's claims is that defendants use the 'Sabacc' mark with the intention that consumers associate their unlicensed product with the 'Star Wars' franchise and its licensed products,” Judge Seeborg wrote at the time.
Since Seeborg's ruling, Ren Ventures agreed to voluntarily surrender its trademark for cancellation with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. According to the parties' joint stipulation, the TTAB cancelled the Ren Ventures' trademark in August at Lucasfilm's request.
Lucasfilm was represented in the matter by Fabien Thayamballi and Cynthia Arato of Shapiro Arato. Shannon Broome, is lawyer for Ren Ventures at Hunton Andrews Kurth.
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Ross Todd is Bureau Chief for The Recorder, a San Francisco-based ALM affiliate of Entertainment Law & Finance.
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