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

I don’t find it surprising. Both Valve & GoG are also being sued by the same people, so it makes sense for them to err on the side of caution - especially since there is an active lawsuit going on regarding some of those very same claims. So there’s really no longer a need for Valve or GoG to wait for a counter-claim.

The timing of this latest take-down suggests to me that R&F were emboldened by the recent ruling which was favorable to them.

That’s a very uninformed way of looking at it. If you can’t sell your game on two of the most popular channels, then it hurts your revenue stream. And that directly affects your ability to pay the team that’s working on said product. I mean, it’s not that hard when you think about it. If you can’t sell cars out of your parking lot because it’s flooded, how are you going to generate revenue to pay the people tasked with selling those cars?

That’s not how that works. You don’t hire one person as “release manager”, unless you have many products to manage. It’s rocket science and it’s all scripted. You build the local asset, commit to Steam via console, login to Steam and set the build live. Done. It takes all of 5-10 mins depending on how long it takes to build and upload the files to Steam.

I don’t see how they would fire anyone who does this sort of work that anyone could very well do.

LOL! In all fairness, he’s referring to the on-going court case :)

Well, the employees/for hire people that will not be laid off will be the attorneys. In the end they will be the only ones that win. This lawsuit never should have gone this far, and I think the odds of it going to a trial increases every week. Stardock has made/continues to make a big mistake, as they have a great deal to lose from all of this. I still believe it falls back to a lack of due diligence and understanding of what was purchased at the auction - which is funny as attorneys should have been involved there.

What are the specific grounds for the DMCA? I took a peak at SD’s website and it looks like the “race DLCs” are not being offered anymore. what are the current claims against the product? Anyone know?

Looks like Brad has left QT3 with a very brief opus:

I can’t understand why people think Brad and Stardock were unaware of what they bought given all the disclosure he himself has made regarding emails and contact between himself and Reiche and Ford as well as his own posting here and elsewhere before the lawsuit claiming to understand that Reiche and Ford owned all the content and he was just buying the name.

The problem is all one of his own creation because he flipped his story around and sued them saying they don’t own anything and were just contractors.

Brad and the company knew exactly what they bought. They just didn’t think the original creators would tell them to go pound sand when he asked them to be involved.

In my mind this is part of due diligence.

That kind of thing definitely isn’t part of due diligence. But it looks like we’ve had almost the same discussion before:

Exactly. He knew damn well what he bought and what he didn’t buy. He made a conscious decision to try and grab more. There’s no need to speculate about this. His own words made it completely clear (as the judge noted in the recent decision).

He could not control the narrative and that seemed to bother him; his need to control opinions is demonstrated by his mass deletion of posts on the SCO Steam forums. He always gave me the impression that he believed that we should take his statements as a gospel truth even when those statements were in direct contraction to his prior statements or established facts. For example, witness his continued efforts to cast doubt about P+Fs creation of Star Control. Even Accolade had written documentation acknowledging P+F as the creators. It is an absurdity, akin to me making a suggestion for a feature regarding GalCiv that made it into the sequel (which happened) and then claiming that I was the creator of Gal Civ 2.

Enough with the assumptions that anyone who has disagreed with Stardock’s actions in this case simply hates Brad. If someone actually hated him this would be bad news. A hater would want him to post more since he screws himself so completely when he does.

Personally, I’ll give his ragequit a “meh”. I don’t feel any sympathy, nor any joy, or really care much at all. He has plenty of other places to post and continue to shoot himself in the foot. Just look at the steam thread with the self-damaging unintentional hilarity of going back to the “not creators” thing, especially after his posts about him removing that claim from the lawsuit out of the goodness of his heart. (Though the best part of that thread is others saying he should sue those guys)

There’s a decent chance the forum bail out was something prompted by his layers. I’m sure after his attorneys read the recent decision they had a talk with him and pointed out how his public statements not only have factored into the case but have pretty much sabotaged and destroyed it. Perhaps in a small moment of self-awareness he realized he can’t help himself and he needs to be restrained.

In his posts about this case I usually got the impression of a man who knows deep inside what they are saying is bullshit but if they can somehow convince others they hope to succeed in convincing themselves.

This mindset is evidenced by things like the desperation with which one clings to and repeats the things they want to convince themselves are axiomatic truths. In this case take the “you can’t copyright names” statement. The nuance and context of the fact that copyright protects characters and the fact that technically you can’t copyright a name alone is completely irrelevant to the actual dispute can’t possibly be lost on a reasonably intelligent individual as himself. Yet the mantra is repeated, even to this very day, in an effort to make it true and make it matter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if SC:Origins showing up on the Most Disappointing list here and not Best list factored into his leaving.

That’s my point. It is, most kindly, a smokescreen. If an executive announces layoffs on public fora- during the holidays no less- within a few hours of an anticipated DMCA notice, he either planned the action (and notified his employees) well in advance or he’s bluffing. Either justification has a negative impact on his workforce for what gain? Public opinion? Unprovable damages?

This is part of the ongoing case, though. No, not in a direct sense. It’s a “separate legal matter” if you look at it from the perspective of a court docket. But it’s absolutely a result of the escalation of that fall then the suit that was filed in December 2017 (or whenever it was). The lawsuit ensured that P&F were going to tighten up their claims as much as possible, and the stakes meant they were going to fight back with as much as possible. The DMCA is a direct result of this.

Yeah, we have. ;> I almost tagged you so you would know that I acknowledge we’ve been down that road.

Also that they agreed (and voluntarily stipulated to being Ordered) not to DMCA until the Judge ruled.

One nuance of DMCA law that I just realized is that P&F are on safer ground than I had thought with this DMCA. Even if SC:O is ultimately found not to be infringing, they only need to show that they had a good-faith belief that it was.(*) See 17 USC §512(f). And as the judge recently noted (Page 6,Line 13):

Between March and August 2018, Wardell confirmed that Origins will include “classic Star Control aliens,” including the Arilou and Chenjesu.

This is Brad’s social media commentary coming back to screw him. His own swaggering statements handed P&F the ammunition they needed to show a good-faith belief that SC:O is or would be likely to be infringing, so that they could DMCA it.

* EDIT: On further review, they are even safer than I thought. 17 USC §512(c )(3)(v) doesn’t actually require their notice to state that SC:O is infringing, but rather only requires them to state that it was not authorized. So even if it’s not found to be infringing, I don’t think that P&F can actually get in trouble for DMCA-ing it. Arguably, this is a loophole in the law, possibly put in by an RIAA/MPAA lobbyist, and I would probably change it if I could, but it is what it is.

The other nuance was Stardock dragging its feet about providing access to SC:O assets in discovery, which possibly strengthens the good-faith-belief argument. (Although to be fair that’s a very heads-I-win-tails-you-lose sort of conundrum, since who knows what they’d find.)

I’m pretty sure it takes a whole team of people to perform this task. Three people, minimum. I buy lots of games on Steam, so I know this.