Yes. Your buying SC:O contributes to Stardock's legal fund and their attempts to undermine Paul and Fred's legitimate intellectual property rights which are necessary to produce Ghost of the Precursors. Please don't do that.

[NOT]

I don't know about many of you, but actively inciting a review-bomb on this forum should be a bannable offense.

It doesn't matter how you feel about Stardock, the UQM forums is not the place to incite witchhunts and brigades.

Do you think Stardock would take it kindly if it were to find out a review bomb started right here?
Do you think it would just let this forum stick around after being that hostile?

Other people in this thread are worried about Stardock shutting UQM down, which Brad far and away does not want to do, so don't become a reason for it.

Nobody said anything about review bombing them. Nobody said anything about inciting a witchhunt or a brigade. In fact, I deliberately said NOT to do it because IT WOULDN'T BE EFFECTIVE and PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE A BAD OPINION OF SC:O. Twisting peoples' words doesn't exactly endear them to your position, nor will it make them want to discuss MegaMod. 

Hmm...while it is certainly possible for boycotts to be organized on dishonest grounds, that does not mean that most boycotts happen that way.  I have certainly not heard any suggestion of P&F trying to organize one.  However, there is ample evidence of Stardock's own actions and statements getting people upset enough that they might try to do so.  If a boycott does happen, I would suggest that Stardock look at itself, rather than casting about for an illicit conspiracy.

Elestan, this is where you have to read between the lines.  I'm not saying Paul and/or Fred or some 3rd party working on their behalf is who is organizing the boycott, but very well could be inciting them with their carefully worded posts... or this could just be the work of "Trolls" or essentially those who get joy in seeing things being destroyed just to suit their desires.

Or I'm actually a fan who was playing Star Control 2 before these forums ever existed, and I'm legitimately pissed that someone I thought of as an otherwise OK guy is now trying to swindle Paul and Fred out of their property. Nobody called for a boycott, not even me. I merely mentioned the possibility and that it probably wouldn't be effective anyway since most people haven't even heard of SCO outside of these forums, and those who have already have a uniformly negative opinion. It's neither my fault nor my problem that Stardock's actions have alienated what few people would've bought their cheap knockoff. There's no grand conspiracy to deprive them of profit, but merely individual consumers reacting to Stardock's horrible behavior.

• Arguably, the Publisher has twice expressly abandoned any trademarks in the alien names by flatly stating that it had no intention to use those names in the future: Accolade in mid-2002, and Stardock in 2015. After Accolade's alleged abandonment, F&P open-sourced UQM (using at least one alien name in commerce). After Stardock's apparent abandonment, F&P made their GOTP Announcement (which still features many of the alien names). What was the effect (if any) of these purported abandonments?

Their announced intent to abandon those marks may create grounds for equitable relief whereby StarDock would be estopped from enforcing those trademarks on account of promises made previously (even though they do not otherwise constitute a valid contract).

At this point their strategy seems to be to bleed P&F until they beg to settle. I would say 'boycott Star Control: Origins' would be the best way to ruin that strategy, but at this point people either don't know it exists or seem to despise it, so I'm not sure it's even strictly necessary.

Sheesh, the amount of people who only joined the UQM forums to circlejerk on the settlement case disturbs me.

Any of you only-one-post-histories want to talk about UQM, HD-Mod, HD-Remix, UQM-Extended, or the MegaMod?

How about the new custom border system I've been cooking up to make modding easier?

Or has the UQM forums become the sister site to the subreddit where the only discussion that gets any traction is bitching about Stardock?

For most of us, nothing much has happened for many years and this is the only news. I am not disparaging your work. The bulk of our visitors in the past were people new to the series trying UQM at a friend's recommendation, or using it to re-play SC2 one more time. Mods and other fan content appeal to only a fraction of the visitors, and most of the ones who do try other things don't stick around long. I had to get used to this too back when #uqm-arena was semi-active. Net melee was very, very niche.

This. In my case I picked up SC2 from a retail store (back when that was still a thing) around '94 or so. This was also back when the lander bug was still a thing. I played it through, had my fun, and back to the shelf it went, only to come down maybe once a year to do a playthrough because its still fun. Fast forward to a few years ago when I started using Debian full time and found out about UQM, the HD mod, and more recently Project 6041. I've been lurking the forums ever since. It took the lawsuit to get me to sign up, though, but only because there's so much bullshit flying around I just had to say something. In any case, if people don't want to talk about it, then be the change you want to see.

Sheesh, the amount of people who only joined the UQM forums to circlejerk on the settlement case disturbs me.

Any of you only-one-post-histories want to talk about UQM, HD-Mod, HD-Remix, UQM-Extended, or the MegaMod?

Way to make people feel welcome, dude. I know I for one feel ecstatic to talk about MegaMod after this. </sarcasm>

But OK, try this: Has there been any movement on the Project 6041 front? Last time I checked in on them their installer was broken due to Google Code shutting down. If they're not going to be making any progress I really wish they'd just post their decompiled assets so everyone else can play with them.

I sometimes forget that people aren't working with even a basic understanding of IP.

That's not nearly as bad as people working without an understanding of the most basic fact of all in this equation. What am I talking about? Well...

But we do see that Accolade's employees (namely P&F)

Stop. Right there. Just stop. They weren't employees of Accolade. You could've figured that out from reading the recitals in Paul's original 1988 licensing agreement with Accolade:

Publisher is in the business of developing and publishing computer software programs. Developer is in the business of developing recreational computer software programs, and desires Publisher's expertise and assistance in marketing Developer's products.

-- Licensing Agreement between Accolade, Inc. and Paul Reiche III, October 7, 1988

and later in Section 12.6 where both parties expressly characterize their relationship as involving that of Independent Contractors:

Developer will be deemed to have the status of an independent contractor, and nothing in this Agreement will be deemed to place the parties in the relationship of employer-employee...

-- Licensing Agreement between Accolade, Inc. and Paul Reiche III, October 7, 1988

Also, please note: While there is a presumption of authorship on the part of employers for the works of their employees, the same is not true of independent contractors when it comes to software. Unless you have an agreement specifying the transfer of intellectual property rights from the contractor to the contractee, all rights to said work remain with the contractor.

Short version: a game company automatically owns the game copyright, without the need for any registration or contract.

Registration is requisite in order to sue for damages in federal court. However, that's not at all what the recent registration was about. The work in question was already registered, but rather what was recently recorded was a transfer of rights over all audiovisual and textual materials (i.e. everything other than the source code) from the several authors responsible to Paul and Fred, i.e. registration# PA0002107340 which transfers "by written agreement" the rights of the listed authors to the listed copyright claimants. This is intended to undercut the argument by StarDock that this was some kind of joint work and/or that Paul & Fred were employees of Accolade rather than independent contractors (this being a claim StarDock has made in an attempt to ensure that their purchase of the Star Control trademark and its backing assets would include Star Control 2).

Stardock is trying to use these new release agreements to say that the employees owned copyrights until a few months ago (really unlikely).

Were they employees of Paul & Fred, or were they themselves independent contractors? I have a feeling the answer is "we didn't document anything very well", hence the necessity of this assignment (which they didn't have to do and was very nice of them, I might add). That, however, doesn't change anything as far as what rights StarDock has: if they were employees of Paul & Fred then Paul & Fred own it all per the terms of their licensing agreement, and if not then they owned everything severally and Accolade had no legal right to any of the audiovisual or textual assets used.

TL;DR You're wrong on some points, and if I come off sounding like a dick it's only because your post could cause confusion to the detriment of Dogar and Kazon, so apologies in advance.