The Third Doctrinal War -- Stardock, Reiche/Ford, and Star Control

Thank you.

Interesting stuff. I’ve thought about trying to buy the Freespace IP from time to time.

You claimed repeatedly that Brad didn’t understand what Stardock had actually bought, and only found out about it much later. Again, this is what you wrote:

it is that he paid good money - in good faith - for something. Only to find out YEARS down the road when he tried to exploit the benefits of what he BOUGHT, that it was “tainted” by claims which weren’t previously known

It doesn’t contradict what you wrote in the latest post, since your last post is. But these phantom claims that came out of nowhere years later don’t fit in at all with the facts of the case. You’re refusing to admit this mistake, which makes it impossible to understand what your actual position is.

I stand by that statement because the sequence of events proves that to be a fact. You can it ignore all you want.

If back in 2013 Brad felt he didn’t have rights to certain aspects of the IP - as his emails to P&F would suggest - then in 2017 suddenly (after getting no traction from P&F) he outlines to P&L what he thinks he legally owns (and was just trying to play nice with P&L and not ruffle feathers - precisely as his emails would suggest), how does that not support my statement? Why else would he not have outlined in 2013, what he then outlined in 2017 and which led to the lawsuit?

There is no “mistake” to admit to. We’re all offering opinions on our reading of what has been presented. What makes you believe that your opinion and interpretation are more accurate than mine or anyone else’s? I’ll wait.

Contact Joe Morgan at Webbush Morgan. Good luck! :)

I don’t know what the relevance of any of this is. Once again, this is what you wrote:

it is that he paid good money - in good faith - for something. Only to find out YEARS down the road when he tried to exploit the benefits of what he BOUGHT, that it was “tainted” by claims which weren’t previously known

What exact “claims which weren’t previously known” are you talking about here? Everyone, including Brad, agreed from the start that Reiche and Ford owned the copyrights and that Stardock could not use the SC2 lore without a license.

Mostly the way your interpretation is incoherent and contradicts the facts. It’s almost like you just made shit up in the beginning without knowing anything about a case, and are now refusing to own up to it.

Is that timeline accurate?

I thought part of Stardock’s claim against P&F was that Brad reached out to them before buying the rights and they made no effort to correct him.

As far as what’s public, yep. I think Brad said so last time, but I might be misremembering.

This is allegedly Stardock’s CEO in the private discord channel threatening to “eliminate” fan communities.

From: http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=7396.0

Not sure what they think they can do to the uqm project. Certainly the domain mentioned could go, but pretty sure they have no say about anything else in that project (for the same reason they said they would need a license to do anything with the sc1/2 ip).

If true, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would purchase another Stardock game ever. Imagine if such a threat were levied at this community over this thread. Disgusting.

If they start slapping it with lawsuits who is going to pay to defend against them? To even get to a demurrer can cost quite a few billable hours.

EFF or FSF?

Oh you sweet summer child.

But seriously, one can only hope. The legal system here in the US can be used effectively to bully people. There is SLAPP but to counter a suit still costs a lot of money up front in most cases.

As an aside, all you US QT3ers who can afford it get umbrella coverage. I’ve had to use mine and it was worth every penny I’ve ever paid in premiums to have the insurance company swat away a frivolous lawsuit.

Edit: I meant that as just general advice, not that I think any of us are going to get sued.

Oh, Americans.

The forums is hosted in the Netherlands and IIRC by xs4ll. Good luck with sending takedown notices… they will just print them and wipe their butts with them.

Stardock has filed trademarks on all the classic aliens.They’re also claiming to be the rightful owners of all the copyrights, as their current line of defense is that Reiche and Ford were just Accolade contractors and the 1988 contract was invalid from the start.

So it’s certainly plausible that they’d use that to DMCA the UQM project’s source code hosting on Sourceforge (it’s unfortunate that the project id there is “sc2”). They should have no case against things like forums, bug trackers and wikis. But not having a case is unlikely to stop Brad. It looks like all of that is hosted under sub-domains of a university student union. Might be easy to bully, might be basically impossible, depending on if the university itself has their back.

Bullying universities in the Netherlands is very unlikely to work.

Universities, fully agreed. But are the student unions technically independent or are they affiliated with the university to a large enough degree that they could count on least some minimal legal aid? The way that’s structured seems to vary a lot between European countries. You’d presumably know :)

Anyway, hosting all of that data on another domain would be trivial. The only thing that would get lost is 15 years of built up bookmarks, links, and search engine reputation.

Actually, I’m not sure, and I think it depends on the organizations in question. They are generally independent (the one that I helped found was), but they do get support from universities (office space, mail boxes, e-mail accounts, etc.). But I don’t think any US-based company would want to sue EU students: that’s a can of worms best left unopened, I’d say.

That Discord screenshot has finally pushed me over the edge. Some of the things Brad has done in this thread have made me angry, but this is too much. Threatening to eliminate long existing Star Control community websites and forums?

I will never purchase another Stardock product. I wish i could go back in time and cancel my preorder of Star Control: Origins.