The Third Doctrinal War -- Stardock, Reiche/Ford, and Star Control

It’s not at all important to whether the legal defence fund economically benefits them. That’s all I was saying.

Exactly. As I said in my post, everything the fund pays for is money P&F don’t have to spend themselves, hence a direct economic benefit.

People who call everyone else ridiculous and just declare themselves right are invoking way more imagination.

If you think someone is doing that you are free to challenge them.

As it is people have indeed put for the ridiculous points. Why they were ridiculous was clearly explained. The people themselves realized they were being ridiculous and bowed out. If you want to take up the torch of why a legal defense fund is shameful and disgusting, or why the ethics of the situation are determined by “is there something in it for me” please do.

Until they are a just some schmuck sniping from the sidelines who won’t even bother to explain or support their position.

It is amazing that people are still arguing and trying to assign motives to the legal defense fund when we have pretty clear evidence in the thread why they set it up. Because people asked them to. Fans wanted to contribute so they set up a way for them to do that.

Those bastards!

Getting back to the case itself, there has been an interesting new development that I don’t think was touched on here. Steam and GOG have been brought into the counter-suit. Other than one document that is a notification of the lawsuit to them I haven’t see any detail about this. I assume it has to do with continuing sales of the original after the DMCA.

What do you mean by “brought into the counter-suit,” Thrag?

There’s this doc on the courtlistener site:

Summons Issued as to GOG LIMITED, GOG POLAND SP. Z.O.O., Valve Corporation. (jmlS, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 10/18/2018) (Entered: 10/18/2018)

Here’s the courtlistener link for the case again.

Maybe I wasn’t clear - the well in this example doesn’t get built. edit: or could have been built for a fraction of the cost and time

I had a friend (therefore this is 2nd hand reporting, no proof per se) who volunteered to help build a school in Thailand. He paid £1000 odd to be part of the team (that’s another thing that seems odd - pay to work for someone?) and spent the summer, built the school everyone was happy.

When he got back, he discovered the same organisation was advertising for volunteers to build another school. The ad seemed suspiciously close to what he had originally replied to, so he did some digging.

Turns out the company was building the school, then tearing it down, and building another one, and the local chiefs/head honchos etc were being paid off.

Agreed.

I suppose, for me, having seen that some “charities” are shady, or have shady character within them. I don’t trust any of them now.

plus, as a Kenyan who still has links to Kenya (family, friends etc) it irks me that this is the image they choose to represent, and so many people are profiting off the monetisation of poverty.

They’re named as defendants in the amended counterclaim.

Reading through the most recent complaints and responses so much of stardock’s case rests on a couple of really shaky things.

First the notion that P&F aren’t really the creators and have no rights at all. So much rests on the jury buying this notion. I have no idea how they would even attempt to prove such a thing to a jury. They are unlikely to have any documentary evidence to present about the creation of the original games at all, much less some that may prove that P&F didn’t really create the games. The copyright assignments are in place now. There are public statements from the people involved that they were the creators. P&F will likely be able to bring some of them up to the stand to testify. Really, what could Stardock’s plan to prove they aren’t the creators possibly be? It seems all they really got is “well, they didn’t officially register the copyright until recently”.

Second is this notion of how they acquired “common law” trademarks that weren’t listed in the bankruptcy sale for things like “The Ur-Quan Masters” or “Frungy”. The notion that a common law trademark existed for all the alien names in the first place is ludicrous. This would be a complete up ending of trademark law if it is found that one registered trademark == common law trademarks on all names associated with the mark. Even if it is granted that these marks existed, their transfer is another huge issue since they aren’t actually listed anywhere in what was sold.

Random interesting factoid I ran across reading the recent docs:

GOG Limited is or was a company based in Nicosia, Cyprus and has merged with Counter-Defendant GOG Poland sp. z.o.o., which is a company based in Warsaw, Poland. These two entities are collectively referred to as “GOG.”

I did not know that.

The GOG and Valve related stuff starts at the “ninth cause of action” in the doc Ginger linked above.

Some bits:

GOG concealed material facts that it had a duty to disclose. Specifically, GOG
concealed the alleged expiration of the Atari-GOG Agreement on March 22, 2015 that is the
foundation for Stardock’s claim that all subsequent sales of the Classic Star Control Games on
GOG infringed on Stardock’s purported trademarks and copyrights.

Stardock and GOG made these false representations and concealed these facts with
the intent to induce Reiche and Ford to act as described herein, for example, to allow continued
sales of the Classic Star Control Games on GOG that Stardock now alleges support its claims for
infringement and that it has established trademark rights, among other things, and to forestall
Reiche and Ford from halting the development and release of Star Control: Origins as a derivative
work from Reiche and Ford’s Star Control Games.

In justifiable reliance on Stardock’s and GOG’s conduct, Reiche and Ford were
induced to allow the continued sales of the Classic Star Control Games on GOG, among other
things.
As a result of Reiche and Ford’s reliance on Stardock’s and GOG’s conduct,
Reiche and Ford were damaged in that, among other things, the allegedly infringing sales of the
Classic Star Control Games continued for another 3-4 years during which Reiche and Ford’s
liability to Stardock allegedly accrued, and Reiche and Ford were induced into a false sense of
security and to sit on their laurels while Stardock’s plans to steal their copyrights and trademark
rights proceeded.

This appears to be in relation to how Stardock is suing P&F regarding the sales of the classic games. If I’m not mistaken it can be paraphrased as “Everyone gave the okay and were in on the sales, nobody mentioned the agreement expired, then one party turned around and sued us for those sales you and they allowed”.

Also in relation to GOG:

GOG breached the contract in one or more ways, including but not limited to:
a) GOG improperly used Reiche and Ford’s THE UR-QUAN MASTERS mark; b) if Stardock’s
allegations are true, GOG failed to obtain the rights to the product names and related trademark(s);
c) GOG failed to defend and indemnify Reiche and Ford against Stardock’s claims;

This appears to be saying to GOG, hey, if we are being sued for this then you obviously didn’t get the rights to the name from Stardock.

From (c) it would seem in the GOG-P&F-Stardock sales agreement there was an indemnification clause. It could mean that GOG may be on the hook for a portion of damages or costs related to that part of Stardock’s complaint.

From my reading of the most recently amended complaints I am getting the distinct vibe that P&F lawyer’s response to the laughable initial settlement offer is essentially “oh, you want to play hardball, you don’t know what hardball is motherf*$ckers”.

If this doesn’t go Stardock’s way, if Origins is found to be a derivative work, it may get taken down. They may have to give all the proceeds to P&F. They may also have to pay damages. Or all three. While I don’t think that is probable it is entirely possible. It’s a huge risk to take with a jury. A jury that will likely hear a stream of people confirming P&F’s creation and ownership of the series and a lot of technicalities from Stardock.

The risk equation has really flipped here. With the game being released now and no ability to simply speculate about huge sales and how the blog post could damage them, proving some monumental amount in damages for the original claim is going to be a hard road. If P&F are the mutli-millionaires claimed they can probably take the hit of any damage amount Stardock can realistically claim.

If we are to believe Stardock’s claims of how much it spent, and the claims of P&F’s wealth, if this goes to a jury P&F are risking the comfort level of their retirement and Stardock is risking the company.

Yes this is what i find most confusing about the whole thing.

$300,000 is peanuts for a company like stardock. If they’d accepted that atari had conned them in the fire sale, and thus they couldn’t develop a new game, they could have still built something else.

Seems to me that the current costs are such that there is no real benefit to SD even if they do win.

I think Cyprus in the EU is a similar deal to Bermuda & Delaware in the USA. Pretty standard for companies of a certain size to have these holding companies for (perfectly legal) tax and or administrative reasons.

For example Electronic Arts has both and a ton more.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/712515/000095013010001579/dex2101.htm

To correct my assumption above, the GOG/Valve involvement is not just about the classic games, it’s SC:O too.

Notwithstanding that knowledge, and without Reiche and Ford’s permission, Valve
and GOG continued selling Reiche and Ford’s Star Control Games and/or Star Control: Origins,
which is substantially similar to and/or derived from Reiche and Ford’s Star Control Games.

This really did get a whole lot more interesting with these additions.

A knee jerk reaction is of course that this is a foolish move, going after two big distributors whom they may one day want to rely on to publish their games. Since P&F are suing them this may make them more sympathetic to Stardock if they are called on to testify.

However from a legal perspective they’ve added two deep pockets that will likely desire to settle quickly. While I’d assume that all conversations between Stardock and Valve/GOG about the games are already requested from Stardock’s side in discovery, this potentially opens up new avenues for discovery.

Also GOG may not be sympathetic to Stardock since while P&F officially brought them in, Stardock’s actions made that inevitable when they added the issue of the classic game sales on GOG to their complaint against P&F.

You know, this could make the forums a lot easier to read. I mean, a lot of arguments would basically boil down to:

[POSTER] realleges and incorporates herein by reference their responses to
posts 1 through [QUOTED-POST-#] above as if set forth in full.

[POSTER] adds one new statement.

I think there is some real potential here.

Stardock’s legal strategy seems to be to throw as much as they can at the jury and hope they’ll be so confused that they end up thinking left is right and right is left. Stardock’s just been piling up the claims. I hope it won’t work, since P&F’s argument is much simpler, and I would assume that people respond to that rather than to Stardock’s bluster.

Is it? With how Brad’s gone on and on about how expensive Origins was, I doubt it. Certainly, the game appears to have suffered poor sales so far, if Steam Spy is anything to go by (and currently at only 70% positive on Steam).

There’s always Activision? I mean, they have a good relationship with them on account of Skylanders.

It is. Brad has said as much himself when discussing this case. Based on what I’ve read, that $300k IP investment represents a small fraction of what has been put into developing SC:O.