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'Star Control: Origins' Pulled From Steam And GOG Following DMCA Claim (polygon.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tussle-continues dept.

PC gaming stores Steam and GOG have took down the video game Star Control: Origins following DMCA takedown notices issued by two designers of the original Star Control games, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Star Control: Origins, a spiritual successor to the old games, is a strategy game about exploring space in an alternate galaxy. From a report: According to Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, those who have already purchased Origins can continue playing it. He added that the DMCA claim will cause his company "to lay off some of the men and women who are assigned to the game." The legal battle over the future of the Star Control franchise dates back to 2013 when Stardock purchased rights to Star Control intellectual property from Atari during a bankruptcy auction. Three years later, in 2016, Stardock revealed that it was developing Star Control: Origins. At the time, Stardock said it was working under the assumption that it had "acquired the rights to Star Control 1/2/3." Court documents reveal that may not be the case, and that Ford and Reiche may instead have conflicting rights to the IP.

11 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. What a mess but... Stardock is to blame here by vux984 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I like Stardock games, and I've read good things about star control: origins, although I haven't purchased it (yet). I was a big fan of the originals, and planned on buying the one from the authors too... (Ghosts of the Precursors) when it comes out.

    TFA has a pretty good summary though, of why stardock is to blame here, in the judges own words:

    âoeThe harm Plaintiff [Stardock] complains of is indeed of its own making,â writes Armstrong. âoePlaintiff had knowledge of Defendantsâ(TM) [Ford and Reicheâ(TM)s] copyright claims from the outset. Despite that knowledge, it developed potentially infringing material without resolution of the IP ownership issues, and then publicized the release of that material during the pendency of this action. It now claims that its investment in Origins and reputation are on the line. Given that Plaintiff largely created the foregoing predicament, the Court is disinclined to extricate Plaintiff from a peril of its own making.â

    It was beyond foolish to produce the game without resolving the IP conflicts which were a known issue from day zero. It's not like this copyright action came out of nowhere.

    1. Re: What a mess but... Stardock is to blame here by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also Stardock should have paid attention to the situation. Ford and Reiche had a 1988 licensing agreement with Accolade with Accolade owning certain things like the trademark but Ford and Reiche owning other things. Stardock believed it purchased all necessary IP when it bought out Atari's assets (who had purchased Accolade) when Atari when bankrupt. However two things should have alerted Stardock that this claim was tenuous. First was the 2002 open source version of SC2 called The Urquan Masters which was initially released by Ford and Reiche and not opposed by Atari. Second was the 2011 inclusion of Star Control 1 and 2 on the GOG store. As soon as it went on sale, Ford and Reiche objected and contacted Atari who worked out a new licensing agreement with Ford and Reiche.

      The Urquan Masters port is telling because it does not use the Star Control name (trademarked by Accolade) but is essentially the same game as SC2. If Ford and Reiche didn't have IP rights they could not have open sourced it. During the incident with the sale on GOG, Atari all but admitted that it did not own the rights to SC1 or SC2. Thus when Stardock bought Atari's assets later, Stardock could not have bought the Star Control rights.

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    2. Re: What a mess but... Stardock is to blame here by H3lldr0p · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's likely a "speak no evil, hear no evil" situation. They didn't ask and when someone brought it up, Stardock likely replied that they didn't want to know.

      Stardock wanted the brand that was it.

      Maybe it's time we started to look at forcibly retiring trademarked brands when the original company goes under or is bought under duress. All this seems to do is to turn brands into trading cards to be traded among companies. That's not good for anyone other than the wealthy who try to hide behind them.

    3. Re:What a mess but... Stardock is to blame here by vux984 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, the IP situation is odd, but they clearly knew it was odd AND contentious BEFORE they started writing code so they should have worked it out ahead of time.

      The situation started because "Ford and Reiche" sold the rights to the Star Control trademark(name). And after they had sold that, they announced that that they were creating a successor to Star Control. And they are obviously not allowed to do that.

      Actually they absolutely can. They sold the trademark. Trademarks are funny things, they don't come with any of the copyrights. They are JUST the name. As long as the sequel doesn't use the $NAME, they can use everything else.

      but they claim they don't use it(And thus don't need it), because Star Control: Origin contains their own ip, set in the Star Control universe.

      They could have made a star control style game like starcontrol 3's relationship to starcontrol 1/2, and called it star control because they DO own the name... but they apparently reference the Arilou, and apparently had DLC with the Melnorme in it etc... so they very likely crossed the line into using IP they don't own.

      "Somehow unrelated: Star Dock had the right to sell the old Star Control games."

      In much the same way buying (non-exclusive!!) rights to distribute the Ghostbusters movie doesn't give you copyright on the movie, or any of its songs, or rights to the future of the franchise etc. You have a right to make copies of that one thing and to sell those copies. That's it.

    4. Re:What a mess but... Stardock is to blame here by WorBlux · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. entered into contract with Accolade, a game company to develop Start control, wherin the creative content of the game would be copyrighted by Ford and Reiche, and accolade would get exclusive rights as long as a minimum royalty was paid. Accolade also recieved rights to the trademark and and marketing materials created for the game. Atari later bought accolade, but did not pay the minimum royalty from 2001-2011, so the publishing rights also reverted to Ford and Reiche. Later F+R, Atarti, and GOG entered a three way agreement to publish SC1/2, which did pass to Startdock for a while.

      Ford and Reiche didn't sell the mark (and never owned it), but trademarks do have fair use exceptions, one of which is the nominative use. For example saying software is compatible with Windows does not violate Microsoft trademark. I don't think the simple truthful description that a game contains material from or is in the same universe as a different game is unfair use of trademarks.

  2. Re:A Difficult Situation For Both Sides by JackieBrown · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why should the company that made the new game pay 50 percent to past contributors?

    They aren't Disney ;)

  3. Re: A Difficult Situation For Both Sides by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you believed you owned 100% of something why would you give away half?

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    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  4. Re:TAKEN... They've TAKEN in down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, wrong! wrong! wrong!

    The past participle of the infinitive verb 'to take' is 'tooked'.
    Gawd, everybody knows you add a 'd' at the end of a verb
    to build its (I bet you thought I was gonna use "it's" there, didn't u)
    past participle. It's usually used with an auxiliary verb such as "done" --
    I done tooked your bike, MF'er.

    Taken is the name of a 2009 movie staring Liam Neeson. Everybody knows that!

    CAP === 'fixation'

  5. The article is incorrect. by N_Piper · · Score: 3, Interesting

    here's a reading of the judges opinion on a request for injunction against DMCA takedown notices https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    It is quite apparent that at no point did Stardock believe it had purchased Star Control 1&2 but what they may have thought was that by releasing the Star Control 2 source code as "The Ur-Quan Masters" under GPL that Paul Reiche and Robert Ford had given up any commercial interest and thus the entire game was free to redistribute as they saw fit when in reality the actual graphics, text and audio were all released under Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike and the copyrights and trademarks other than the "Star Control" name itself are still held quite tightly by Paul and Robert.

  6. Re:A Difficult Situation For Both Sides by Junta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the ownership of the content beyond the brand is fuzzy.

    Star Control was owned by Accolade, and didn't go with Paul and Fred. Accolade was able to release Star Control 3 using a different development team as an example of this seeming to be the case, using the brand and the characters. Stardock paid $400k for this.

    It's worth reading both https://www.stardock.com/games... and https://www.dogarandkazon.com/ to see both sides.

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  7. Re:A Difficult Situation For Both Sides by Junta · · Score: 3, Informative

    Paul and Fred's side: https://www.dogarandkazon.com/
    Stardock's side:
    https://www.stardock.com/games...

    Basically, Stardock wanted to do Star Control and paid $400k for what they believed would enable to do it legally from Atari, and reached out to Paul and Fred to get them onboard, but Activision blocked that. Paul and Fred asked they not use the species and such verbatim, though at the time the legal picture is fuzzy (Atari probably sold *all* rights to Star Control 3, which would seem to include most of the species and ships, even if SC1/SC2 picture is fuzzier), so Stardock agreed.

    When Paul and Fred *could* do something, things went sour quickly, with Stardock going crazy that they would be *competing* with Paul and Fred rather than cooperating with them.

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