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Topic: Making a video to help spread the word about the Frungy Fund and Stardocks greed (Read 6517 times)
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CommanderShepard
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There's no reason to take Brad or F&P that seriously as if it's some giant conspiracy, they're not even lawyers. It's classic PR just like how pro wrestlers scream at each other to get the crowd psyched before a fight, except where the crowd doesn't have such a great time and no one cares for the fight.
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« Last Edit: July 28, 2018, 02:36:55 am by CommanderShepard »
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Elestan
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It's classic PR just like how pro wrestlers scream at each other to get the crowd psyched before a fight
Sure, but I find the arrogance and manipulation in some of Stardock's statements to be particularly distasteful...as (to be fair) I did the now dis-owned "Brad will be publicly humiliated" tweet by P&F's PR company.
For example, Brad is now citing this thread as evidence that P&F are inciting the fans against Stardock:
Paul and Fred, through their misleading public statements and very public smear campaign have created the conditions that have resulted in people suggesting boycotts, Steam review bombing, smear videos, etc. It is worth noting that other than Elestan, every active anti-Star Control: Origins poster on the UQM forums showed up after Paul and Fred's professional PR campaign (back in February). You can actually check the posters in this thread over there to verify for yourself. The argument that "Stardock brought it on themselves" would only hold water if these people had shown up in December (when Stardock filed its complaint).
He's baked at least four flawed and/or misleading assumptions into that beauty:
- That anyone who joined this forum since December must have done so because of P&F's PR firm. Because there's no other way to find out about things on the Internet, right?
- That people here are "anti-Star Control: Origins", as opposed to "anti-Stardock" (or "anti-Brad Wardell"), I recall few if any negative posts here about the game itself; as opposed to the company's choice of legal strategy.
- That the "anti-" people could have only become so because they saw some (unspecified) misleading statement by P&F, as opposed to thinking for themselves and reaching a considered conclusion.
- That this thread contains posts from every "active" anti- person.
The rest of his post runs the usual gamut of Stardock's unproven legal assertions, now focused on their new strategy of trying to paint P&F as being at the bottom of a grass-roots conspiracy to malign Stardock. It's actually been kind of interesting...every time Stardock comes out with a new legal brief, the focus of Brad's social media posts changes to play up the new narrative.
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« Last Edit: July 29, 2018, 09:09:17 pm by Elestan »
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CommanderShepard
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Sure, but I find the arrogance and manipulation in some of Stardock's statements to be particularly distasteful...
Brad can say whatever he wants publicly which I can attest to just like F&P can, it's just typical PR for pre-sales which a lot of companies do, and people only take notice because he happens to be very good at it. When you learn how he named planets after people in exchange for pre-sales, it's ingenious since it both does the work of his own team having to come up with names and gets players invested in the game, so it seems like he knows what he's doing.
But ironically, doing all this PR about his personal opinion instead of sticking to Stardock's more defensive expression of what it believes to be factually true would have probably turned more fans against him than F&P ever could have. Stardock doesn't actually have "facts" to support their claim of Fred and Paul's conspiracy to infringe on any of Stardock's ability to exercise its rights, that's why Stardock isn't legally asking for punitive damages, and if Fred and Paul did do it, then how could SCO be so successful already?
Legally, it seems a very weak argument given the lack of direct evidence and how liberal free speech laws are and so he's very unlikely to win anything on that grounds, so there's no reason to pay much attention to it.
Could he be held liable for abusing the case itself just to get sales? Since he filed similar claims as part of the complaint, if he does it to an extreme extent such that the judge deems it is was his obvious intent, then it would seem that yes, the court could very well hold him liable for punitive damages for those actions and that is part of Fred & Paul's countercomplaint, which is possible but just as unlikely as his own claims of ill-tent from F&P. Free speech covers a lot of things, so the statutory damages would come more from the alleged copyright and/or trademark infringement than anything else.
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« Last Edit: July 28, 2018, 10:03:56 am by CommanderShepard »
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rosepatel
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There's dozens of times that P&F talked about developing and planning a follow up to Star Control game for many years. Sometimes it was called a sequel, a new game, a follow-up. Atari never sued them. Even for the first few years after Atari's bankruptcy, there's a few times where even Stardock called P&F's hypothetical game a "true sequel", most notably after the GOTP announcement.
To Stardock's point, they've since taken the position that this isn't allowed. Stardock edited their announcement to stop calling GOTP a true sequel, and if I remember correctly, they only did this after the lawsuit was underway. Funny enough, Paul and Fred only had one announcement to edit, whereas Stardock had made several posts, some of which continued to call GOTP a sequel in the early months of the lawsuit, until Stardock had scoured the internet to clean up their own "mistake".
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« Last Edit: July 28, 2018, 06:02:26 pm by rosepatel »
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Narsham
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There's dozens of times that P&F talked about developing and planning a follow up to Star Control game for many years. Sometimes it was called a sequel, a new game, a follow-up. Atari never sued them. Even for the first few years after Atari's bankruptcy, there's a few times where even Stardock called P&F's hypothetical game a " true sequel", most notably after the GOTP announcement. To Stardock's point, they've since taken the position that this isn't allowed. Stardock edited their announcement to stop calling GOTP a true sequel, and if I remember correctly, they only did this after the lawsuit was underway. Funny enough, Paul and Fred only had one announcement to edit, whereas Stardock had made several posts, some of which continued to call GOTP a sequel in the early months of the lawsuit, until Stardock had scoured the internet to clean up their own "mistake".
I know that after Gary Gygax got ejected from TSR, he published several more novels in his Gord the Rogue series, which were unmistakably sequels to the novels he published under TSR, Inc. I suppose we can't conclude anything without knowing the circumstances of the contracts between him and TSR, but TSR was famously litigious at that point in time, and Gygax did end the series by destroying the Greyhawk setting that TSR was continuing to develop. At the very least, that suggests the situation of sequels is complicated.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Aha! At last a decent parallel.
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Tas
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One of the reasons why GyGax got ousted from TSR though was because he insisted that the authors of the individual works own the Copyrights directly and none of them transfer to TSR.
Gygax could not make a competing game system, but the novels and stories within the greyhawk setting were always his and his alone and only licensed to TSR for publishing. So it is similar but not the same as the current Star Control dispute
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Well, yes. Just being in the same series doesn't make something a sequel. The only two sequels I know of among the 18-some Final Fantasy games are Tactics 2 and X-2. Similarly for Zelda, but I understand they've tried to fit things together somehow.
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rosepatel
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Stardock talks about how confused the fans are about the games, let alone the source of the games, but it doesn't seem the fans are confused at all. About the lawsuit, sure. But people knew they were getting two games, from two sources, with two different stories. Everyone was saying all along that only P&F would be able to continue the story from Star Control 2, whatever language you want to use to explain that. That includes Stardock's description.
Really, the most confusing part was all the times Stardock said that Paul and Fred was somehow consulting on Origins, and it turns out they hadn't traded more than a few emails.
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Krulle
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*Hurghi*! Krulle is *spitting* again!
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A lot of things and posts have beena rchive in the waybackmachine.
archive.org
It may be difficult though, to find the posts there. Their search engine is notoriously bad in finding the results you want.
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