You're doing WHAT with friends? Zynga sues Bang With Friends maker
Farmville biz lobs trademark sueball at secret bunk-up app
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Social games designer Zynga is suing the makers of casual sex app Bang With Friends for trademark infringement.
Zynga - which says it owns the '...With Friends' brand - is no stranger to the courts, having been sued a number of times by competitors who alleged it copied the design of their games.
But seeing as one of the rival firms allows you to surreptitiously get jiggy with your friends, and the other allows the world to innocently waste their time playing Farmville, it may be difficult to immediately see how BWF could have ripped off Zynga.
But the games firm claims the naughty-knickers hook-up solution ripped off a trademark covering the names of apps like Words With Friends, Hang With Friends and Scramble With Friends.
“Zynga filed a lawsuit to stop blatant infringement of its valuable ‘With Friends’ brand,” Renee Lawson, the company’s deputy general counsel, told Bloomberg in a statement. “Zynga is compelled to file suit to prevent further consumer confusion and protect its intellectual property rights against infringement.”
“As a technology company, we take intellectual property seriously, and will evaluate the case in detail once we receive a copy,” Bang With Friends said in a statement.
In the past Zynga has been sued by EA over claims The Ville ripped off Sims Social, and has faced action from a number of other firms.
The games designer was also forced to lay off more than 500 staff earlier this year after its share price plummeted.
Current affairs mag Time recently named Farmville in a run down of the 50 worst inventions of all time, slamming it for getting the world hooked on a "bizarre digital addiction".
“The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game," the magazine moaned. "It's more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops."
Bang With Friends offers anyone seeking to romp with their chums a hassle-free hook-up mechanism. Both parties sign up to the app and choose a list of people they would like to bump uglies with. If a pair of people choose each other, they are alerted to their mutual attraction and can then proceed to make the beast with two backs at their own convenience. ®
