Heh… so every shot from the rear arc is effectively a free aimed shot at the rear armor?
Light mechs should dominate in that environment.
Uh oh.
https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/9113
Looks like Harmony Gold (RoboTech) are suing some folks over BattleTech designs. Also sounds like this isn’t Harmony Gold’s first time at these types of antics, either.
Obligatory “Fuck Harmony Gold” comment.
Didn’t they swear they had settled this ages ago?
To be fair to Harmony Gold, the best looking and most iconic Battlemechs were the crossover models from Robotech. To not be fair to them, holy crap, still this remains unresolved? Shouldn’t there be a definitive answer at this point who has rights? It’s apparently a question that never gets resolved.
Color me unsurprised. The Harmony Gold-BattleTech saga has been going on for decades, culminating in the ‘Unseen’ mechs (Wasp, Stinger, Archer, Phoenix Hawk, Marauder, Rifleman, Longbow, Warhammer, Crusader, among others) being retired or redesigned. Uncoincidentally ‘Unseen’ is the name of my MWO clan.
PGI subsequently redesigned a number of those mechs prior to introducing them in MWO. There has been some speculation that several of the mechs hadn’t been altered sufficiently to avoid infringing HG’s license in spirit.
Despite being a rabid BT fanboy, I’m also a huge Robotech fan. The result of having a decent level of knowledge regarding the origins of the issue, I find myself coming down on the HG side.
This exactly. I’m no fan of Harmony Gold, but the original dispute with Battletech is pretty solid.
Bit of a shame, I was looking forward to this one.
What even funnier about the Harmony Gold mechs is that they looked so cool FASA didn’t even bother trying to make congruent the appearance of the model and their “canon” Battletech weapons loadouts. Sometimes they had extra gun holes or unaccounted for bits (the Wolverine was carrying a purse?) they just glossed over.
To be fair to FASA though their 3025 sourcebook was also the only sourcebook with in-house generated designs that didn’t completely suck as well. Designs like the Catapult, Atlas and Urbanmech have stood the test of time. Those later mech designs made 15 years later in the stupid years of Battletech post-FASA look like a high school kid’s notebook scribbles by comparison.
Yeah the design crossover definitely confused me when I was younger. I used to get up at 6:30 on Sundays because that’s when Robotech was shown. I always hoped it would be the Scott Bernard cycle because I liked that one best. And then later when I started into Robotech I would think wow, that’s exactly like a Veritech, or something. Never really did grasp how they ended up that way, I guess the Robotech makers licensed out the designs or something and they expired? Presumably they were ok with all this at one time?
No one was okay with it. The details are messy and the stories vary with two sides, but it basically boils down to Japanese animation and design company Tatsunoko incorrectly licensed a bunch of mech designs to FASA in the 80’s. Apparently, Tatsunoko didn’t actually have the right to do this because the license was already given to Harmony Gold. The case was eventually settled out of court and whatever the terms were, FASA phased out most of the disputed mechs from their materials.
That’s a very succinct overview of the mess!
Are those Mechs even in the new game?
Still, after the matter was settled it should’ve been it, but maybe someone somewhere decided that they needed to redesign the redesigned Mechs to make them look more like their previous look…
Yeah. Ha ha. The dispute has dragged over three decades despite the settlement because the rights keep getting snarled up every time either party tries to sub-license their property. It’s obviously vastly more complicated and contentious, but the short version is that they really have to figure out a solution for those 20-something mechs that they’re fighting over.
Edit: I found the briefs for the 1997 suit between FASA and Playmates/Harmony Gold.
I think ultimately this goes back to a few of the reseen mechs just being a bit too close to the unseen mechs (I’m looking at you, Warhammer, Rifleman, and Phoenix Hawk!).
I wouldn’t worry about it. I doubt this will amount to a significant delay. The impact to MWO will likely be more significant (as they’ll need to produce replacement designs), but for the HB BT game, they’re at an early enough stage that they should simply be able to replace the flagged assets with other assets (e.g., swap out a Rifleman for a Quickdraw).
Arg,
I didn’t realize they “redesigned” the unseen mechs. That’s a pretty dumb move, since it’s established the originals were in copyright breach, you now need to prove you developed the redesigns without input from the originals (since redesigning from them to change them would be derivative work), and that’s obviously a very hard sell, unless they look really different (they don’t, some “redesigns” from MWO are, as noted above, quite similar to the originals).
Of course IANAL, so my understanding of copyright law might be faulty.
I’ve never heard of that being an aspect of copyright law. Genuinely, never. What I have heard is that the redesign has to be sufficiently distinguishable as to not give rise to a reasonable person mistaking one for the other (think particularly in terms of phones).
I’ve heard about something like that but for patents, not copyright. No idea how it could even work for copyright…
Probably not a surprise. No sense cluttering up my Steam wishlist for now. See you all in 2018!
Sigh, I got the same news a couple days ago about Super Mega Baseball 2.
Oh well. Not like I don’t have xcom2 dlc inbound along with Warhammer 2. ;)