In the final days of the year, alongside the last thrilling matches in the most exciting League of Legends tournaments like LCK and LPL before the Lunar New Year break, the community has been paying attention to Riot’s copyright lawsuits. The first case was the publisher announcing it was suing a Vietnamese studio over allegations of copying characters, storylines, abilities… in the League of Legends game.
However, while this lawsuit was widely supported by the League of Legends community, Riot made a blunder by suing a young female artist for infringing on its Arcane trademark. Specifically, according to the artist herself, she was sued by the “father” of League of Legends for her comic and t-shirt products named Arcane Flames (which shares the word “Arcane” with Riot’s debut film series).
Yet, this time Riot was condemned. According to the artist KuttySark, her Arcane Flames comic series released its latest chapter back in 2019. The t-shirt design considered one of the first illustrations of Arcane Flames was launched as early as October 11, 2018. Therefore, Riot’s accusations could be seen as extremely unreasonable. At that time, Riot might not have even thought about creating a cinematic masterpiece starting with the Arcane series.
And Riot had to publicly apologize for its unreasonable extremism. However, the apology from the League of Legends publisher sparked another wave of outrage. The reason is that Riot only blamed the review departments for not being thorough without mentioning the young artist who had to face this lawsuit alone and the appropriate compensation for her.
In this case, Riot made a mistake, but it is clear that this publisher cares deeply about its money-making brand. However, this is clearly a very sensitive issue where even a small oversight can heavily impact many individuals and groups, including Riot itself.