I didn’t say they were preventing SC:O from being made, I was saying the project was being threatened. Legal squabbles of what Stardock does and does not have rights to, the marketing/PR damage, etc. So those are all legitimate threats to the success of the project that have nothing to do with whether or not they are preventing them from making the game.
All the threats you mention are a direct result of Stardock voluntarily filing suit personally against Paul and Fred. All the PR damage comes from their aggressive actions and the complete reversal of their stance. If Stardock wanted to avoid those threats they should not have gone back on their word and then sued. Until the suit was filed the only “threat” was that upon seeing the Ghosts announcement people would say “meh, I won’t buy SC:O and I’ll wait for that game” but everywhere on the internet this is being discussed I see people saying they want both games. The only time I see someone saying they won’t buy SC:O is because they are suing the original creators of the classic Star Control games.
I think the key point is the claim from P&F that the rights that Stardock bought from Atari wasn’t valid in the first place and all rights stay with them. If true and left unchallenged, this can jeapordize the entire SC:O project so going scorched earth from that point on doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.
I do think Stardock takes a lot of the blame for getting things to escalate to this point but all actions afterwards seem par the course to me.
Stardock thinks, rightly or wrongly, it bought the trademark for the name Star Control. What he meant was that P&F can make a Star Control game all day long but not call it Star Control, though they could use all the assets around it.
Now they’re defensively claiming P&F have no rights to the original content b/c they were just developers, not “owners” of the software. I think this is probably wrong b/c of the extensive rights they negotiated with Accolade … but IANAL nor have i looked into this extensively.
P&F is claiming basically a “color of title” issue that Stardock couldn’t own the trademark because it reverted back to P&F automagically and shouldn’t have been available to sell at all. As far as i can tell. So like a third party getting screwed SD is left holding the short end of the stick with a claim the seller had no right to sell. So they decided to sue to defend that claim.
This sucks mostly because i don’t think they’re going to try to win outright on the merits but on the monies. All the conversation about defaming or confusing their trademark of the name Star Control really is Stardock’s position that they have a trademark to defend, where P&F are seeming to claim that trademark is invalid. So by the nature of their disagreement SD is going to attack P&F’s right to SC (which, again, i think is spurious since those rights were painstakingly negotiated in the past).
But if Stardock’s trademark to the name Star Control is upheld than P&F would be in violation of trademark if they also asserted their claim to that name, the same way a rando company can’t call their game Madden or Call of Duty.
It wasn’t really a misunderstanding. It was a case of one side completely changing their stance. Stardocks stance was that P&F owned the lore, and even if somehow legally Stardock owned it they refuted that ownership. P&F were in total agreement that they owned the rights to the lore, as explicitly spelled out in the original contracts. Then last year Stardock’s stance changed to they own all the lore and they started applying for trademarks for names from the lore.
Stardock went from confirming that P&F own the rights to the lore, to claiming that P&F own nothing and never owned anything to begin with (and may not even have substantially contributed to the creation of the lore).
P&F’s position is that the only thing purchased was the trademark, the name “Star Control”. In regard to the IP this was Stardock’s position initially as well. The initial dispute was over publishing rights to the original games, which led to the DCMA request when Stardock started selling P&F copyrighted material without permission. Only after that did Stardock suddenly “realize” that P&F owned nothing and that Stardock owned everything.
Stardock’s position before this was, as quoted above:
"I also want to correct something I saw: Again, disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. But my position is that Stardock doesn’t have the legal rights to the original lore either. Or, if we did, we have long since refuted those rights. The Star Control classic lore are the copyright of Paul Reiche and Fred Ford.
I post that sort of thing publicly partially because while I own Stardock today, if something happened to me and someone else took over Stardock I don’t want anyone to even be tempted."
Now they say P&F own nothing and they own the original lore. One can forgive all the legal wrangling as part of legal wrangling if they want, but there’s no excuse for this radical change of position. It’s dishonest and dishonorable.
I guess in my mind I separate arguments & claims first made as part of legal proceedings and things that aren’t.
In my professional career I’ve seem lots of crazy claims raised in lawsuits my company has been involved in that the opposing side also knew to be over reaches so I tend to discount them until I see which claims gets focused on as part of the litigation afterwards. The US legal system seems to encourage this for better or for worse.
Did you listen to the interview above?
True, he posted that. I guess his excitement got the better of him? Then he saw TfB promoting the game as true direct sequel to Star Control and using that SC2 boxart, trademark he owns and is releasing new game with soon…and realized that it is probably not ok.
In the interview he mentions an example of what would happen if, say lead designer on StarCraft left Blizzard and announced a new game with new name as a “true direct sequel to Starcraft” - would Blizzard be ok with it? My guess is not? Even if he had the rights to the universe and characters and what not.
I mean, the very first thing on the OTC website is “An economic strategy game by Civilization IV lead designer, Soren Johnson.” There’s nothing on the page noting that they don’t own the trademark for Civilization IV. Civ is an economic strategy game. OTC came out April 28, 2016 and Civ VI came out October 21, 2016. Should Firaxis be suing the shit out of Soren personally?
If you go on the record across many web sites and interviews claiming that you are hoping something happens and then it happens and then you turn a complete 180 then I don’t really care the reason. Perhaps it is good business but it is bad PR and ethics in my view. As a frequent customer (e.g. I own the aforementioned OTC) I feel like I was lied to selling me a false narrative of Stardock’s vision of Star Control which I was excited about but that they seem to have no intention of following through with.
What if you flip this around. What if the lead designer leaves with all the rights and then Blizzard decides to make the sequel to Starcraft with the things he has the rights to? That’s totally cool? Rights just don’t matter?
But that’s not what they’re saying. P&F didn’t stop at “P&F, the original creators of SC are making a new game”, they went further and said “P&F, the original creators of SC are making a new game that is the true sequel to SC.”
The other example used in the podcast was what if Lucas announced plans to make ‘The true sequel to Star Wars: Episode VII’. How well do you think that would go over at Disney?
No, because you’re talking apples and oxen here. Brad specifically addresses this exact issue in the linked interview above and explains their position. I think the exact example he uses is if they had said “From the people behind Star Control 1&2, here’s Ghost of the Precursors!”. There’s a huge difference between that and “The sequel to Star Control”. Now, if OTC was a 4X game similar to Civ and their blurb said “From Civ4 lead designer Soren Johnson comes the latest Civlization game!” there’d be major issues on Firaxis’ part. Rightfully so.
Trademarks are there to avoid confusion. Stardock releases SC:O in 2018. They come out with Ghosts of the Precursors in say 2020 as the “sequel to Star Control”. That’s their trademark complaint, it creates confusion. It’s not the sequel to SC:O.
He also addresses the point where P&F haven’t made direct claims to be the sequel in those exact terms, but how they’re promoting it in the media, the retweeting of those media headlines calling it the Star Control sequel, etc.
Well considering that Lucas sold the ownership of the IP to Disney, not great. If Disney had just bought the words “Star” and “Wars” in that order and not much else, they’d look pretty silly protesting Lucas continuing to use the content he owned however he pleased.
And? I think it’s plausible that’s truly what he wanted.
I think the lawyer at Disney who didn’t realize they forgot to secure any of the rights to the characters would be having a bad day.
I think those specifics are what needs to be decided on in court. I’m not making a claim either way while I think a lot of folks are just assuming that everything that either P&F or BW are saying is complete, factual, and law.
I mean, we know what Stardock actually bought, and we know the content of P&F’s original agreements with Accolade. SD didn’t buy the lore, races, etc., and Brad himself said as much. It wasn’t something anyone would have even imagined disputing until SD did a really unfathomable about face, denied the literal truth of their previous statements and the literal truth of all evidence available, and started claiming ownership of the whole shebang.
Having read all the documents in the legal filings, the ones P&F have made available, and the various emails Brad and Stardock have posted on their legal Q&A and on various reddit threads, I absolutely do not believe it is plausible. I don’t know how it will end up in court, but my personal opinion is that I was misled and lied to about the situation based on things said over the last couple years and then the actual correspondences shared.
I know that my feelings aren’t law and I don’t expect everyone else to feel the same. But that’s my opinion after reading through everything.
I do totally agree that P&F’s initial announcement was ill advised in saying a true sequel to Star Control and Stardock has a totally legit gripe there. However it’s one that could have been settled with a request to change the wording and acknowledge Stardock’s trademarks, which P&F did.
Suing for untold damages over that initial announcement, especially when Stardock repeated that announcement as part of their own marketing for SC:O, is a bit over the top but not out of the bounds of reason. Then using that suit as leverage to demand P&F hand over all the IP Stardock claims to have refuted all right to, well, that’s where things start to go sour for me. Making moves to trademark the names in the lore they said they had no right or claim to, that’s getting into dirty pool.
P&F shouldn’t have used the mark in that way in that announcement. Stardock shouldn’t be going back on their word and trying to grab all the original lore. P&F changed their announcement. Stardock is still trying to bury P&F under legal bills and damages in order to get their IP.
I largely agree with you, but having had some experience with how legal disputes over contracts go, I at least can appreciate (if not agree) with the atomic option SD went with in responding to the IP.
I guess for me it just comes down to having enough personal experience with legal bullcrap that I tend not to trust myself to take, what I had thought were fairly obvious statements/filings, as meaning what I thought they would mean if I were having a conversation with an average Joe on the street.