Namco Bandai announces a lawsuit against Eagle Distributing

According to case information found over at Justia.com, Namco Bandai Games and Namco Bandai Games America have filed suit against Eagle Distributing of Frankfort, Illinois for alleged copyright infringement and intellectual property violations.

The suit claims that Eagle Distributing is currently in violation of Namco Bandai's properties through the sale of unauthorized and counterfeit products without authorization from the company. These products include their GameboX Multi-arcade systems and Ms. Pac-Man and More Cocktail and Upright cabinets. The lawsuit seeks damages, right of seizure, and a stop to any further violations from Eagle Distributing.

It will be interesting to see what sort of response this lawsuit has. Namco Bandai has notoriously fought to protect its copyrights on arcade properties in the past (including a famous lawsuit against Midway over Ms. Pac-Man), so this is no surprise if Eagle Distributing is indeed in violation of Namco Bandai's copyright protections. It also poses the question of just how many of these companies that feature multi-game units such as the one's from Eagle Distributing are actually doing so without the appropriate authorization from the holder of the intellectual property. It seems in light of this lawsuit, it may be an important question to ask (so long as financially supporting an IP holder is important to you that is).

I'm in the process of getting a copy of the actual lawsuit so I can go over it in a bit more detail. Once that's made available to me, I'll post a few more details from the case filing.

Eagle Distributing's website can be found at http://www.eagled.com/index.htm.