As I noted above, arguably Brad has had this in the public eye since they got the trademark in the bankruptcy sale (which given it was a bankruptcy and by the terms of the original agreement everything gets voided if there’s a bankruptcy seems to me that everything should have reverted to Paul and Fred right there and Atari had nothing to sell… but the courts will determine that) and has been making public overtures toward them all along. They weren’t saying Boo really until they announced they’re making a sequel to Ur-Quan Masters and then Stardock slapped them with the “WE OWN IT ALL!” lawsuit.
Going to full trial is incredibly expensive and time consuming. There can be a calculation that public opinion may make an favorable or at least amicable settlement more likely. So while your cliche is a possibility it does not necessarily follow that simply going public implies weakness of a case.
Or it could be that after a couple of months of silence after announcing their follow up they were pissed and wanted to explain to the fans waiting for new what was delaying things and there was no larger scheming or calculation involved.
If one want to play “who started it”, yes, P&F made the first “public” mention of the suit against them in their blog. But when it comes to waging a battle in the public the scope and volume of PR efforts since has been rather disproportionate.
Stardock has already sunk significant resources and years of development into the project. Once P&F took it to the media, you can’t exactly remain silent.
In what universe was Stardock silent before?
I didn’t and I don’t think anyone else has implied that they should “remain silent”. Remember the context is that you bought up a connection between waging a PR battle and the merits of a case. Pointing out the scope and volume of PR efforts between parties in response to such a statement is not a request for silence.
I certainly may have missed it. Can you link me to the Stardock PR about the legal issues prior to Dec 1 2017? I’m honestly asking, I couldn’t find it but I’m trying to Google on mobile, which is a pain in the ass.
Looking back on the Star Control thread on this forum, no one seemed aware of the dispute until Nightgaunt linked to Fred and Paul’s blog taking the fight to the public.
Legal issues, maybe not per say. P&F allege Stardock had been making false claims about their agreement and participation in the Stardock product prior to it all hitting the fan.
Oh, for sure. Stardock has been talking about the acquisition and development of the game since they bought it back in 2013 or so. So fair point there. I was referring more to public statements in regards to the legal disputes and litigation. And again, I’m not claiming those statements don’t exist, just that I’m not aware of them and why I stated that P&F brought this to the public arena.
Yeah, and that’s something you probably should be cautious about doing with a previously-owned IP until you know all areas are covered. And in this case, at the very least that certainly doesn’t appear to be what happened.
If you feel like you own something, and you feel that someone is infringing on your ownership rights – and this is whether or not that feeling of ownership is grounded in legality – you probably want to speak up and say “Uh, wait a minute…” And again, that’s not judging the merits of either side’s claim, just simply stating that it seems understandable that if Reiche et al thought they had a valid claim on that IP, that’s absolutely when they should speak up.
Agreed. If it turns out that Stardock’s rights weren’t sound, that’s a major cock-up on their part.
The first public mention of a legal dispute was made by Paul & Fred on December 1:
It seemed to primarily be about rights to sell the games on Steam and GOG, and Stardock’s appropriation of Ghost of the Precusors into their “multiverse” plan. It could have also been about Stardock putting images of the SC1&2 characters on their website and attempting to trademark the term “Super Melee,” which happened about a month before. They also say that Stardock told them that they cannot make a sequel to SC2/UQM without Stardock’s permission. None of the legal claims mentions this this communication, but it’s only a few days later that Stardock filed the first lawsuit, primarily claiming trademark infringement, which is basically the same thing.
It certainly did snowball, right?
First we’re at a selling the old games on GOG and now we’re at calling the creators of the game and lore not the creators and trying to stop them from making their game?
Remember GDC15 during the post-mortem - https://youtu.be/Napx0MjivCM?t=52m58s
That’s often how lawsuits go, and why it fucking sucks that this has gone this far.
Star Control 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I wish everyone had just been able to work things out and both take a stab at making more games like it. I think we’ll still have that, but not without a lot of acrimony and ill will.
I was at that! Classic games postmortems are one of the biggest reasons I’m sad I don’t have a GDC press pass anymore :(
It was already in the public arena. That there was no mention of legal proceedings is irrelevant. A lot of what Stardock was doing - going to well before the announcement of F&P’s game - could be considered posturing (I am guessing F&P felt something like that).
This is total speculation, but my guess is that P&F’s announcement was prompted by Stardock’s actions, but not in the way Stardock wants to claim (that they are trying to siphon off the goodwill for the Star Control name and the visibility it has with Origins in the works). Given the back-and-forths they’d had with Brad, and then Stardock’s moves with the classic games on GOG (EDIT: Not on Steam, as I mistakenly said at first) that started to show holes in their “nothing but respect” line, I bet P&F figured they had to plant a flag or be in danger of Stardock quietly trying to have their way with the IP. Paul & Fred having intent to put the IP to work makes the wrangling over the IP a lot more stark. Only other reason to announce a game they’ve barely begun working on is that it was the 25th anniversary. I bet they could have waited until the 30th, but Stardock was eyeing their stash (sorry, been watching The Wire).
From what I gather, and what is said specifically in the GDC video, the situation was simple: Stardock obtained the trademark (“Star Control”), but the copyright to the actual game remained with F&P. That seems pretty clear-cut to me.
From what Brad has posted, I’m not sure that he fully understands the difference between copyright and trademarks, cf. also his comment that F&P had to “register” their copyright. As far as I know (and I’m doing a refresher course in copyright law this Thursday), copyright is automatic, as someone earlier in this thread also pointed out (and the law is international), and has been for quite a few decades.
A situation like this can get hairy, since trademarks don’t have an expiry date (unlike copyrights, which expire after the original creator has died + a set number of decades, which the likes of Disney are continually trying to push higher and higher). As an example of how weird this stuff can get, just look at what’s happened to the works of Robert E. Howard. Most of his writing has entered into the public domain in a number of territories. But a company called Paradox owns the trademarks to named characters like “Conan the Barbarian” and “Kull of Atlantis”. This has resulted in all sorts of shenanigans where companies have to pay a licence fee to use Conan or Kull (especially in a title), while the original works are, for the most part, in the public domain. Something similar happened with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work – Dynamite Comics were sued by the company owning the trademarks (stuff like “John Carter”) and eventually just bought a licence.
So if Stardock owns the trademark, that just means they can publish whatever and call it “Star Control”. But if P&F own the copyright to the content of the first two games (and it was licensed for Star Control III, which creates precedent), they cannot re-use any original characters/races, etc., without paying a licensing fee. Things become even more complicated with a game since the argument could be made that if Stardock creates a game that is very close to the original Star Control games, they are infringing on F&P’s rights.
Technically, game design as such cannot be copyrighted, though some companies have tried to do so via patents. Not in Stardock’s favour is that they renamed Super Melee to Fleet Battles – that seems to acknowledge that they were violating F&P’s copyright. A court can look at that and see that the overal game that Stardock is making hews so closely to the original games as to infringe on F&P’s copyright even if they switch names around and so on.
Ultimately, of course, only a court can decide if what Stardock has done with Origins infringes on F&P’s copyright. What I dislike about the whole thing is how Stardock is trying to paint F&P as just cogs in a machine and not actual “creators” – that seems disingenuous to me. We all know George Lucas didn’t create Star Wars all by himself and that Gene Roddenberry spun Star Trek from nothing, but at the end of the day one (or two) people made the final decisions and guided the creation of the final creative work, and ergo are thus nominally the “creators”.
Doesn’t mean the situation isn’t awful, of course.
I think that’s a good summary of the copyright side.
Stardock has said that the state of the copyright is basically not at issue here. They are saying F&P have violated the trademark Stardock owns when they announced Ghosts of the Precursors, called it a “direct sequel to Star Control II” and called themselves “creators of Star Control II.” In their settlement offers, they have basically demanded that P&F hand over the IP as part of the damages.
One question about the trademark is whether it is still in force, since it hadn’t seen any commercial use in decades until Origins. This could nullify the trademark, which would mean that Stardock got a rotten deal when it bought the name from Atari. I don’t know if there is any recourse for Stardock in that situation, but I would hope there would be.
Stardock also claims that they have perpetual publishing rights to SC1&2, which is why they can put them up for sale on Steam and GOG. P&F insist that when they do, it has to be licensed from them. This seems like the match that lit the powderkeg over the IP and trademark.
Paul & Fred insist that any obligations they had from the original licensing agreement with Accolade (which Stardock claims to have inherited) are null and void. There are triggers ending the agreement because of bankruptcy (which I think applies at least to Atari when it was the partner in the agreement) and also because of failure to pay the licensing fees to P&F (which stopped around 2000). Furthermore, there’s an addendum to the licensing agreement at actually declares that the development period is over–another trigger for all rights to the content reverting to Paul & Fred. Assuming any one of those was validly triggered, which seems likely, then anything Stardock wants to do with the original games or with their content in Origins needs to be licensed through P&F. And now they seem completely unwilling to make a deal on that.
They do. On your first acceptance you have to affirm it like 6 years later, then re apply/affirm every 8-10 years or else it expires.
Edit: costs like 500 smackers