So I guess they won’t be suing then. Lol.
I’m kinda curious who owns the music. That was the most memorable thing from the first game for me.
Nightgaunt’s timeline mentions them releasing all art assets into the public domain for the UrQuan Masters project. Is it public domain? Off to Google Fu!
Thanks for the info! I can’t even pretend to know how to untangle all of that, so I guess I’ll have to wait for the highly paid lawyers to fight it out.
Well you can often win a lawsuit by having more money than the other guy. Which is shit, and I think it may be Stardock’s plan.
If Reiche and crew want to be mad at someone, they can be mad at whatever circumstances led them to invent a game/toy franchise that’s generated well over $1B in revenue and not be loaded. They should be rich beyond their dreams from Skylanders. The Star Control games must have made a tiny fraction of that.
True, but think he was referring to whether could sue the seller to the trademark in that statement, which wouldn’t help here.
It’s been pretty clear from the start that that is the plan. A lot of Stardock’s early PR efforts on this and other forums involved talking about how expensive the suit will be, how massive the damages will be, how they will certainly have to pay all Stardock’s legal costs, etc. Reinforced when the demands for 225k and all the IP came out. Just the demand of $225k is pretty ridiculous for the “confusion” created by their announcement without all the extra demands. A strategy being employed is clearly to make it seem too expensive to fight and to give up all the IP to avoid burning their personal savings on this. The lackluster performance of the funding campaign has turned that strategy up to 11.
Given that Stardock doesn’t seem to be able to actually produce any evidence that they purchased all the rights they claim to I would imagine they do not want this going all the way to court. From their filings can only state “Upon information and belief” rather than pointing to documentation of the fact in an exhibit in their filing.
“Upon information and belief, pursuant to the Asset Purchase Agreement,
Stardock owns all rights in and to the Atari Star Control Assets, which include but are not limited
to the Stardock Marks and any other trademarks originally adopted and used by Accolade and
Atari in the marketing and publishing of the Classic Star Control Games (including but not
limited to product names/titles, sub-names/titles, cover art, characters (e.g., aliens), alien race
names, characters names, spaceship names and spaceship designs), as well as the Star Control
Copyrights.”
Not, “according to the items stated in the purchase agreement in exhibit X” but just “Upon information and belief”.
In contrast, in P&Fs filing they directly support their stance with documentation.
"Effective April 1, 1998, Accolade and Reiche entered into Addendum No. 3 to the
1988 License Agreement, a copy of which is attached as Exhibit 4, to allow Accolade to develop
and publish new versions and sequels to the Classic Star Control Games using “all characters,
names, likenesses, characteristics, plot line, setting, source code, and any proprietary rights that
Reiche has in and to” the Classic Star Control Games, and any Derivative Works, in exchange for
the payment of an advance and royalties to Reiche.
- Paragraph 1.5 of Addendum No. 3 stated that:
“Reiche Intellectual Property” means the copyright and other intellectual property
rights (excluding trademarks) owned by Reiche, as set forth in the Agreement and
Addenda Nos. 1 and 2 to the Agreement, in and to (a) Star Control I for PC, Amiga
and Sega, (b) Star Control II for PC and 3DO, (c) any accompanying
documentation, and (d) the Star Control II cluebook. The Reiche Intellectual
Property shall include proprietary rights in and to any source code, names (of
starships and alien races), characters, plot lines, setting, terminology unique to the
Star Control products, and music in and to (a) – (d) above.
Paragraph 4.1 of Addendum No. 3 provided that the term of the agreement was
three years, with an option to renew for another three years only if Accolade published a new Star
Control game in the meantime, and that upon expiration or termination, “all rights granted and
obligations imposed hereunder shall terminate and rights to the Reiche Intellectual Property
granted hereunder shall revert to Reiche.”Paragraph 7 of Addendum No. 3 provided that if Accolade did not publish any new
versions or sequels to Star Control, then it would negotiate in good faith with Reiche a license to
any trademarks adopted and used to market the Classic Star Control Games. "
You don’t get to an "on information and belief in that section until:
“On information and belief, on or around April 1, 1999, Accolade was acquired by Infogrames.”
While it’s pretty obvious to everyone that that happened, it is stated that way since they are not offering direct proof for the assertion.
“Fuck those rich bastards” is kind of an interesting argument to go with, I’ll grant you. The back up argument for that of “well, fuck em anyways, they should be rich” is, huh.
Shitty. I’m going with shitty.
I think the music is one of the areas where clearly the copyrights belong to the original composers.
Ur-Quan Masters went open source and a community has been modifying and improving it. One of the things they did was have remixes created of most of the songs. I still prefer the originals.
Dude. If Guap is being judgmental, you’re being much moreso. Maybe consider your tone?
I’ll take a break from the thread, thanks for calling it out. I appreciate it. It’s been a couple of crazy days and I’m probably pretty pissy overall.
Reading through the counterclaim I came upon this bit:
“the main character is called Commander Hayes, just like in Reiche and Ford’s Star Control Games.”
I of course knew they were planning to use the alien names and cultures (just with different colors so as not to infringe, wink wink) but even down to copying the PC’s name?
They really are going out of their way to make absolutely sure they create another SC3 rather than create new IP that can stand on its own. I just can’t understand how they consider this a wise plan. If they were afraid that after P&F’s announcement their game would suffer since it would be seen as a pale imitator to the original creator’s work, they are now in the 11th hour wedging in the classic races seemingly in an effort to make absolutely sure it has all the appearances of a pale imitator.
Unless they really were planning to and working towards including them all along I can’t even imagine what a huge disruption to the production schedule the decision to add the classic races at this late stage must be.
Some greatest hits from the Stardock complaint
As the latest aspect of their carefully orchestrated plan and scheme to deceive and
mislead the public by misrepresenting their alleged rights in the Classic Star Control Games and
promote the Ghosts of the Precursors Game, Reiche and Ford recently commenced a
“GoFundMe” campaign, the so-called “Frungy Defense Fund” (“Reiche’s and Ford’s
Campaign”).
I’m surprised they didn’t throw a “nefarious” up there. I think it improves the flow. “Carefully orchestrated plan and nefarious scheme.”
Indeed, Reiche and Ford, both of whom are believed to be multi-millionaires and
top executives of Toys for Bob, a major studio owned by Activision, are shamelessly asking the
public to fund their defense of this action and underwrite the resolution of a problem that they
themselves created.
Hey look, it’s the very talking point that keeps popping up in comments here and elsewhere.
Given the fact that Reiche and Ford do not need any funding to support the
litigation, including the prosecution of their ill-founded Counterclaim against Stardock, the
primary purpose of Reiche’s and Ford’s Campaign is to promote the previously-discussed game,
which Reiche and Ford have again tentatively titled “Ghosts of the Precursors.”Upon information and belief, Reiche and Ford are now exploiting and taking
advantage of the Star Control fans and community to fund a deceptive campaign to cancel
Stardock’s rightfully owned trademarks and other intellectual property rights and interfere and
disrupt the potential success of Stardock’s New Star Control Game, a game that Stardock has
spent four years and over $10 million developing.
The only thing they need to add is an exhibit photo of Paul twirling the Sidney Whiplash mustache that he surely must have grown while concocting this “carefully orchestrated plan and scheme”.
No worries, friend. Thanks for taking it well.
It is a bit mystifying.
There was a point when Stardock greenlit the game and started hiring, designing, and making assets. At that point in time, their intent (in public messaging, anyway) was to defer from using P&F’s IP. So they set their game earlier in history and even in another universe and they (presumably) carried on with making that game.
If this always seemed to them like a foolish investment–because fans wouldn’t accept not having Spathi and Pkunk, etc (which they have recently publicly claimed is a risk) or because it wouldn’t be a fun game worthy of the Star Control name–then why did they start?
If they always felt that they could finish that game, make it fun, and sell it to gamers, then why start injecting the classic aliens back into the game now, impacting their schedule and risking an injunction that could totally derail their launch?
There are only so many explanations that make this behavior make sense:
-
They always planned to include them, and always believed they needed to to make a viable product. As they reached out repeatedly to P&F, they hoped that eventually they could make a licensing deal happen. They might have included them from early on and just not showed them off.
-
There’s a substantial legal advantage to have them in the game, so they were added just recently in light of the legal dispute. It could bolster their new trademark claims on those aliens’ names. It could support their claim to the right to use the classic SC lore freely. It could protect them from some claim against their Star Control trademark.
Maybe not relevant, but if I were a game developer on this team, I’d be a little irritated at putting them in now (to say nothing of putting them in early on while saying we weren’t doing it, if that’s what happened!). If we have a setting and story that work without them, it’s just an unwelcome mandate, not driven by a game design rationale, that is unlikely to improve the game.
Wow, lots of stuff to reply to today.
Oh, we know. Not much we can do about it though, except hope that P&F win.
No, Stardock picked this fight. When Brad heard that P&F were planning to start work on a new game, he made an apparently baseless claim to control all of their copyrights to the SC2 universe, despite having reassured them for years that he recognized and respected their ownership of that world. I just made a long post on UQM about this.
All of these documents have been posted on the UQM wiki.
It goes back further than that. Infogrames (later renamed to Atari) arguably forfeited those marks way back in 2002, when the UQM project started. For more reasons why the trademarks might not be valid, I wrote a summary on the UQM forums,
As others have said, there’s a nominative fair use argument that this should be permissible. However, P&F also used the box art in their announcement, which arguably could have pushed them over the line. My take is that this probably was an infringement, but not a particularly egregious one.
None of the alien names seemed important enough to register. Where P&F made their first serious mistake was not registering their copyright to the rest of the game in a timely manner (they just filed it this year, after the litigation started). That puts the burden of proof on them, and much of Stardock’s legal ink is spent making them pay for that mistake. Their second mistake was failing to get written work-for-hire agreements from the other people on their creative team. They just got copyright assignments from them in April to try to rectify this. I don’t think these flaws are fatal, but they make it much easier for Stardock to bleed P&F’s legal budget litigating these details.
They had only just announced that they were starting work on the game when they got sued. Also, nothing says that a game developer is required to let people see their work in progress. Personally, I think I’d rather not be spoiled by advance knowledge about the game, and would be fine just knowing that P&F are working on it. More discussion here (forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=7182.msg78586#msg78586)
They bought it at Atari’s bankruptcy auction, with a specific “no guarantees” clause in the sales agreement. The video posted in this thread goes into that. Even if they could sue, Atari’s been liquidated.
Not really. It was Star Control 2’s 25th anniversary; both Stardock and P&F were aiming to celebrate that date with their announcements.
Thanks for the info Elestan.
I agree with everything you said.
P&F in their filing now claim it is #1, that they planned to do so all along and weren’t being honest about it. I don’t know what stage discovery is at and if their lawyers have something to back that up.
If it is #2, even if adding them in strengthens the case it seems like such an incredibly horrible business decision. Literally letting your game’s design and/or storyline be dictated by a legal strategy rather than focusing only on making a great game.
It can of course be both. That they always planned to but hoped they could do so with permission, and that the action of going through with those plans now without any permission has been prompted by the legal strategy.
And as you mentioned, it’s kind of a slap in the face to the team working on the story. Such action is basically saying that what they did isn’t good enough and so the classic aliens need to be inserted to bolster the product, or you are making dictates on the story just to gain legal advantage over the people who created the original work they now are being instructed to copy (or both). Though if the people hired to create the new universe had always hoped (if not planned) that they’d be able to do their own version of the classic aliens then it might be a big positive for the team rather than a slap in the face.
Thanks for weighing in, Elestan! Quick note: In your post on UQM you said “Accolade” a couple times when you meant “Activision.”
You’re right, that email from Brad on 10/4 seems to really be a crucial moment when any goodwill that existed was crushed. “We can use this stuff if we want. It’s just a courtesy to you that we’re mostly not going to.” Until he decides otherwise later.
By the way, I have to ask: You say you’re not a lawyer, but the way you talk about this stuff sounds pretty professional. Paralegal?