Gotcha - sorry if I misunderstood.
Paul and Fred have posted about the legal dispute… and they’re asking for money to help pay their legal fees. This doesn’t make me feel good on any front.
The GoFundMe:
Good fucking god $2,000,000
Do we at least get a game out of it?
Took the words right out of my mouth. But it looks like Stardock intends to play hard ball when it comes to this. It’s pretty ugly.
These are expensive suits to prosecute, unfortunately.
I don’t think this is going end well for them but hope springs eternal.
So basically Wardell will end up stealing their property as he planned to all along. That’s awesome.
Well, at least we know the lawyers will be sending their kids to the best schools.
I dont know these guys but going from “Screw you, we are MAD see you in court!” to “We need 2 million bucks to cover lawyer fees” seems. I dunno, quite a leap?
Maybe if you have zero working knowledge of how the entire legal system works I guess?
That’s the truth.
I guess. But they had been giving the impression they were independently wealthy who were not going to be pushed around. But maybe I missed the “we are also broke” bit.
Apologies if I missed this upstream, but apparently Stardock went ahead and filed a whole boatload of trademarks? There’s a thread about it on Reddit with links to the documents in question.
That seems rather underhanded.
I’m guessing they’re neither independently wealthy or broke. But there was a whole process of appealing to goodwill, blustering, threatening, filing, etc (on both sides) that preceded them going to court. Now they’re in court, and they probably have an actual understanding of how much it’s going to cost.
I don’t know that asking for donations for legal fees sits terribly well for me either, but I wouldn’t judge the appeal based on their earlier rhetoric.
Yeah, I think once it was clear there wasn’t going to be a quick or fairly amicable resolution, Stardock went on a trademark landgrab, because Hey? Why not? Leverage is leverage!
fair, fair. Again I dont know either of them.
That’s disgusting. But didn’t P&F own some of these trademarks already? Reminds me of what Paradox (now split from the game publisher/developer one) did with Conan and other Robert E. Howard properties, where they trademarked basically all major characters etc. just to prevent people from selling anything REH-related without paying them first.
I did some Googling and found out celebrity Adam Carolla raised $500K to fight a well-known patent troll who pretended to own podcasting.
I don’t think they’ll quite hit $2M.
Kind of a “reach for the sky, hit the fence” kind of thing, I guess?
Or a legit attempt to attract a credible patent attorney who was a fan of their work and is not a fan of the way Stardock has handled this and is willing to work mostly pro bono.
How so underhanded? If there’s going to be war, then it’s going to be war.