The discovery can be attributed to a NeoGAF member named Seraphis Cain, who posted his find last Friday. If you’re not familiar, a Let’s Play is where someone records themselves playing a game, adds commentary, and uploads it to someplace like YouTube. But one wonders just what Sony might have done, if they had been granted the trademark.
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“Registration of the applied-for mark is refused because of a likelihood of confusion with the mark in U.S. Registration No. 4459011”, the letter states. A Georgia-based company named Let’z Play of America, apparently.
In other words, Sony is looking to use “Let’s Play” in reference to game streaming. Whether or not Let’z Play has actually done anything with its mission statement is hard to tell, since their online presence is limited to a blank Facebook page and a T-shirt design that may or may not belong to the same organization.
Let’s Play is categorically a specific turn of phrase used to describe guided game walkthrough videos, and it could be argued legally that it’s suggestive of a particular service (Sony’s own) or they could even argue that they coined it, and it thus is what’s called a fanciful mark. The rejection notice points out similarities between LP Let’z Play and the one Sony wants to trademark. Inaction will cause the application to be abandoned, and the trademark will fail to register.
It’s not entirely clear why Sony wanted to trademark this, but given how widely used it is on YouTube, it’s likely for the best that the chances of it going through seem slim.
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Let’s Plays have been around for some time now.
