I’d love to be hopelessly optimistic and think that they were removed on a good faith effort with regards to negotiations of a settlement occurring behind the scenes!
The main game is also delisted.
This might be Valve taking pre-emptive action, Stardock delisting them on their own as to stop willful infrigement or working towards a settlement, a DMCA request by P&F… Too early to tell. Might even be a fuckup by the Stardock employee in charge of the store management or just a change of packages gone awry.
The community hub still exists, and it sounds like Stardock is trying to figure out what happened.
Intern accidentally hit delete instead of update. ;)
Yeah, it is pure speculation as to the reason.
The game is back now, but the dlc isn’t.
Glad to see the main game back. It would be a shame if the game of seeing how close they can skirt the edge of infringement resulted it getting pulled completely. If it did my reaction wouldn’t rise much higher than “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” at this point, but it would still suck.
Filled with regret that I didn’t think of this phrase first.
I really want to be optimistic and hope that the removal of the Alien Name Grab™ DLC was a gesture of good faith and an omen of settlement. Though as on the steam forums the SD rep didn’t seem to be aware of the removal it being intentional on SD’s side doesn’t seem too likely.
Though with the core game itself reappearing if there is an injunction or some type of court order behind the removal at least it’s not the huge escalation that I initially feared when I saw the disappearances from steam. An injunction again the free DLC can’t seriously be considered an escalation of any kind and hardly something to complain about (not that a way won’t be found of course).
Probably depends on how far up the food chain the SD rep is. Community managers (or PR people) are usually not privy to detailed goings on within a particular company, and I fully expect them to be ignorant of what’s being decided among the upper echelons, viz. the lawyers/Brad/P&F. So this doesn’t surprise me.
From what Frogboy said on UQM, it seems to me that this was a risk-mitigation move, presumably to keep SC:O from getting injuncted. They have apparently removed the Arilou/Chenjesu DLC, removed the use of ‘Melnorme’ and ‘Arilou’ from the game, and redesigned the Earthling Cruiser to be less like the SC2 version, renaming it “Terran Cruiser”.
That said, he was clear that they weren’t conceding anything, and that the outcome depended on the trial or a future settlement.
This line is very intersting
I do not think this passes the “Mr. Spock” test. The name is identifiable as a creation unto itself imho.
I’d say you’re right. If you trademark something unique (like “Spock” or “Arilou”), taken from someone else’s copyrighted materials, you wouldn’t stand a chance in court when the original copyright holder issues a challenge.
Otherwise, I’ll go and trademark “Drengin”, “Yor”, and a whole bunch of other GalCiv races. Don’t worry, I’m sure I can arrange a decent deal for Stardock to license those names back to them. I’m nothing if not reasonable! :-P
And from that post on the UQM forum, this caught my eye:
Someone, not necessarily Paul and Fred, may have a copyright to the way the Melnorme and Arilou were expressed in Star Control 2.
Emphasis mine. Still trying to argue this point, huh?
Just judging the tone of his posts, Brad’s stance does seem to be softening. I’m not saying his claims have changed much, but he’s now talking more about what he’s conceded (Super-Melee, etc) and about how he wishes they could meet face-to-face to negotiate. (He says that in the absence of being able to meet directly, he wants to use public forums like Qt3 and UQM to float settlement ideas… That seems a little bonkers to me, and I would think it would be Brad’s lawyers who would object most to that!)
Anyway, with the DLC being put on ice, these things seem to indicate at least a little more hope that there could be a reasonable compromise made.
I have to say, I don’t appreciate Brad saying “No one has tried to prevent Paul and Fred from making a game.” You’d have to pretend that Stardock’s leaked settlement offer from March isn’t “trying” to do exactly that when it would have forbid them from making such a game for 5 years. Negotiating tool or not, I’d say that clearly amounts to “trying to prevent Paul and Fred from making a game.”
I was confused about something Brad posted there. He showed this Arilou-like image and implied that P&F couldn’t claim it violated their copyright:
Is that the current artwork from their game? It looks different (and a lot lower quality, and frankly more like SC2 in certain ways) than the one they showed most recently.
It makes me think I’m misunderstanding Brad’s point here. Does anyone know what he’s getting at?
Finally, I totally missed the use of a Crimson Corporation logo at the end of Stardock’s last Origins trailer.
What in the world does that refer to? I know that it is among the trademarks Stardock has tried to secure recently (and they put a TM next to it). But it’s used like it’s a real-world entity–a production company or something. All I can think of is that it is either:
- an awkward attempt to strengthen that trademark claim by using the term in marketing
- a weird kind of easter-egg use of an in-fiction entity (like, I dunno, a Papers Please trailer ending with “Approved by the Arstotzkan Ministry of Propaganda”)
- an attempted thumb-in-the-eye to P&F, since they’ve been implying Stardock is like the Druuge organization
Do we have any explanation for that?
The picture is of a Psilon from the rebooted Master of Orion.
Aaaaah, thank you. So the point is that there are enough Arilou-adjacent visualizations out there to keep P&F from being able to claim the SC:O one is violating their copyright.
As long as it is not presented as Arlilou perhaps.
EDIT: Though it is rather odd to make a point by asserting your artwork is closer to other copyrighted material you do not own.
I’d be worried about this too. Still, Brad seems happy enough with this argument!
No, I think the argument is simply that the Arilou, the Psilons, and the Stardock aliens (whatever they end up calling them) are all based on the concept of “Greys”, so that P&F cannot claim that the Stardock aliens were ripped off from the Arilou. Quite frankly, it’s obvious that Brad has no idea about how copyright and IP in general works, so I only hope that he has a lawyer that can explain it to him. Which, considering the DLC has been removed, might be the case?
When it comes to copyright infringement, there are multiple boxes you need to tick before you can be taken to court. A direct copy is the most obvious form of infringement (e.g. plagiarism), but there’s loads of grey area in between something truly original (let’s assume there’s something that can qualify as truly original) and a blatant clone. Brad’s argument is that they’re free to use something that looks like the Arilou, as long as they don’t call them the Arilou and don’t incorporate any unique traits associated with the SC2 aliens (hence his emphasis of the word “expression”, etc.).
Which is fair, by the way. You can create something that’s similar in spirit but not an outright copy. That’s how culture works, basically. Adopt, adapt, improve, and so forth. So Stardock’s obviously free to use a “Grey”-inspired alien in their game. Along similar lines, you can create a scifi game or TV show with a Proud Warrior Race that’s similar to the Klingons but not actually Klingons (insert Star Trek: Discovery joke here) without infringing on any Star Trek IP, etc.
This reminds me of one of the laugh out loud moments from earlier in the thread.
“Next time you watch TV, start picking out all the things they do where the only thing they did was change the name but otherwise it is identical.”
“you forgot to change the name.”