This is why I kinda don’t feel like there’s a good guy or a bad guy in this. This is an IP dispute, it’s millions of dollars in lawyers, and it’s not done anyone any good. So much stubbornness- but if neither side was stubborn they wouldn’t have had the successes they had.
It’s hardly stubbornness to say “nope” when someone claims to own your work. Defending in a lawsuit brought against you isn’t stubbornness. Not taking a “give me everything plus a quarter million dollars” settlement offer isn’t stubbornness. The settlement agreement offered by P&F hardly reeks of stubbornness.
When it comes to the suit in general the notion of “both sides are bad” is a completely false one. Even moreso when it comes to talk of stubbornness.
If I told you I owned your house because I found the prior owner’s deed in a file cabinet in a storage locker auction, would you consider it stubborn not to accept my ownership and to actively fight against my claim?
Is this the house he abandoned 25 years ago or the one he currently lives in? ;)
While I don’t want to focus on the analogy, whether the property had been used or not is irrelevant if they still own it. So I don’t think it would be stubborn in that case either to not simply hand over your rights.
For sure. Was just making a joke as opposed to arguing against your point.
I laughed, but I figured I’d address it too since the issue of abandonment gets raised a lot.
P&F refused to even discuss removing the use of the trademark on their blog post until Stardock sued, so their stubbornness really did force the lawsuit. From what I recall of the emails, they were not exactly diplomatic about it, either.
P&F were also suddenly making a lot of demands to see confidential internal builds, and not to use any terminology from Star Control 2, even stuff like “Super Melee”.
Everything after the lawsuit was filed points to P&F as (by far) the more reasonable party, but it’s pretty clear that at some point they got sick of playing nice with Stardock and dug in their heels quite stubbornly. I don’t blame them, given Stardock’s behavior, just saying that “stubborn” seems like a perfectly cromulent adjective.
This is a weird way to frame it as Brad has been the ultimate stubborn one in all of this. He wanted to have his way 10000% and it blew up in his face when it turned out that F&P had no reason to just give him the copyright or buy the trademark from him. Which is when he went around trying all kinds of underhanded schemes to steal the rights, which frankly, in my eyes, leaves me empty of sympathy for him. Hell P&F offered multiple times, even in the settlement phase to try and avoid all of this, to hammer out a deal saying that both of them can make a Star Control game and neither gets in the way. All of them stemmed from a foolhardy crusade to have everything his way.
I’m not sure how point 2 is stubbornness, or at least stubbornness in the ‘insistent beyond good sense’ meaning traditionally associated with the word… If they were concerned about copyright infringement by Stardock, who had at that point already engaged in it, then they had good reason to be insistent on those points.
And can you provide these emails? Though not wanting to change the post doesn’t particularly indicate stubborness in and of itself because IIRC, with how Trademark law works they had a pretty good argument that their original phrasing was descriptive, which falls under fair use.
EDIT: They don’t seem to be in the court documents, unless they’re outside of Stardock and Reiche’s emails to each other. They go up to September 29th, which are marked as ‘3 days ago’ before the GotP announcement went up.
EDIT2: Also Stardock originally calls Ghosts of the Precursors the ‘True Successor to Star Control II’ as well. Also in my same dive in this, Stardock began selling SC1, 2, and 3 as their own games, which uhh, would presumably make P&F pretty reasonably unwilling to give in to Stardock’s demands.
I just believe Brad truly believes he owns what he says he owns, the same way P&R do. That’s why they’re going all the way on this. The best option would have been a settlement, but well, at least one side was too stubborn for that. So here we are, where most likely no one truly wins in the end.
Brad did finally run into someone just as stubborn on lawsuits as he is and able to fight back, and this is what happens when that happens.
He totally doesn’t. He even originally admitted he didn’t, which is why he asked P&F if they could license him Star Control 1 and 2 originally. And then when they refused to because they were making their own game (and said as much) and he suddenly told them he owned everything and he was being NICE offering to be licensed instead of just freezing them out and then set about doing stuff to steal the rights, like coercing the UQM Project, who were granted portions of the copyrights, into giving them and the trademark up to Brad. If he truly believed he owned it, he would not need to do any of that.
And maybe you should have read my post instead of ignoring it and pretending none of it happened. Because as stated, P&F were the ones who tried to settle amicably with Stardock, both make their own games without getting in the other’s way, and Stardock refused and set the terms at ‘P&F works for them, gives up all rights, and is owned by Stardock wholly’. The only stubbornness was that they were ABLE to fight back against Stardock trying to bully them out of their rights.
I’ve poured through the court documents and can’t find any specific emails. Stuff gets quoted in filings, but nothing that talks about this at all. The emails haven’t been filed at all, so there’s nothing that can be confirmed from them that I can find. I can’t even find them in Stardock’s filings. P&F’s the only one who really quotes emails. So yeah, I’m interested in seeing these too.
The best option would have been Stardock making a new game without touching the IP they did not acquire. A “settlement” as you suggest would mean the defendants in this case were forced to cede some of their creative work. Having gone through, for example, the Atari documents extensively I could find nothing – not one single item – that suggested Stardock had any claim to the SC1 and SC2 universes. They had some claim to Star Control 3 and the alleged rights to the mark Star Control, which is now in dispute.
I have yet to see Stardock show anyone anything from their auction documents that shows otherwise. I have seen them repeat arguments about what they believe copyrights are that were already rejected by the court. Ready to change my opinion at any time when someone uncovers something from the Atari sale that is not just the mark and “STAR CONTROL FRANCHISE”, meaning the rights to use the mark in sales, and no rights to the lore etc. from the original Star Control games.
Had Stardock made a new game entirely instead of repeatedly trying to force an inheritance of a legacy they did not own things would be different. At this point I’m really looking forward to the trial.
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no emails or documents publicly released describing the interactions of the parties between P&F’s announcement in early October 2017 and Stardock’s lawsuit being filed in December, so if you have such, I would be very interested in seeing them.
There might have been some materials that Brad revealed on a Stardock NDA channel before the gag order was imposed, but barring that, I believe we have only Brad’s assertions about what P&F were saying to him, and I’m not willing to let him put words in their mouths.
Except that P&F aren’t creating any mud. It’s more like Brad demanding that they give him their furniture, and P&F saying “It’s our furniture, and we moved out of that house 20 years ago; go buy your own”. And then having him sue them over it.
There’s a far greater chance of the court declaring the trademark abandoned, because that actually happens if you don’t use trademarks. Brad would have to find a place where P&F explicitly said they were abandoning their copyrights to get them declared abandoned.
The petty childish bullshit, one day mankind is going to wake up and build cool shit without arguing about who owned what.
Hmmm, if it’s not in any of the court documents, I must have picked it up from the Stardock Q+A thread. Not the most reliable of sources, I know. I’ll see if I can find the exact quotation in my notes somewhere, but no promises.
Probably there’s a reason why Stardock didn’t submit them to the court.
Was information or opinion regarding this case discussed on this channel by Stardock people? If so I would think the associated logs would be part of discovery. I would be curious as to what was mentioned there.
I’m aware of the existence of at least one private area of the Stardock forums and at least two different private channels on their Discord, although my understanding is that some or all of these were shut down following the leak of Brad’s threat to eliminate the UQM community. So the case was certainly discussed there, and I would be shocked if the entire content of those NDA areas wasn’t under Discovery by P&F. It would, however, also be covered under a Protective Order, which means that only the parts of it that are actually used as court exhibits will be revealed.