So there is a legal concept of copyright misuse, usually for instances where someone is leveraging a copyright for anticompetitive or fraudulent reasons.
However, your question has the parties backward. Stardock’s case is primarily based on Trademark law, not Copyright law. So any question of copyright abuse would be as to whether it was committed by Paul and Fred.
I didn’t see a specific claim of Copyright Misuse in Stardock’s defenses, but they do try to make a similar argument that goes, roughly:
- P&F failed to get signed work-for-hire agreements from the other SC2 team members back in 1991.
- Therefore P&F didn’t own all of the SC2 copyrights.
- Therefore P&F committed fraud when they licensed those copyrights for later use.
- Therefore their copyrights should be cancelled.
I don’t give this argument much credit, because there’s quite a bit of evidence that everyone involved intended P&F to get those copyrights, so the missing work-for-hire paperwork is a technicality - one that has since been corrected by P&F getting copyright assignments from those team members.
No, there’s a fair amount of evidence that he knew what he bought. When asked in another thread here whether P&F had given him a copy of the original contracts, he said:
He never claimed the right to use the SC2 elements in new games until Fred told him that he and Paul were planning to make a new game. Until then, he kept asking them for licenses to use them.
As for any remedies if he didn’t get what he thought he was getting, there would be few if any. He bought them at a bankruptcy auction, and the sales contract had a “No Warranties” clause that essentially made it a “buyer beware” sale. Stardock was responsible for doing any due diligence to make sure they were actually buying what they wanted.