Star Control: Origins Removed from Stores after DMCA claims
Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, the designers behind the classic DOS game, Star Control 2 for Accolade have issued a DMCA take down notice to Valve to take down Star Control: Origins.
As posted on Steam --
https://www.screencast.com/t/mODt766t162 (this is the one sent to GOG)
As some of you may know, there is a legal dispute between Stardock and Reiche and Ford regarding the trademarks and copyrights pertaining to Star Control.
You can read the history here:
https://www.stardock.com/games/starcontrol/article/487690/qa-regarding-star-control-and-paul-and-fred
Unfortunately, rather than relying on the legal system to resolve this, they have chosen to bypass it by issuing vague DMCA take-down notices to Steam and GOG (who, btw, Reiche and Ford are suing using GoFundMe money).
Steam and GOG both have a policy of taking down content that receive DMCA notices regardless of the merits of the claims.
We attempted to get a preliminary art injunction to prevent them from issuing more false DMCA take down notices. Unfortunately, the court ruled that it wasn’t the courts place to intervene in the area of DMCAs. Thus, here we are.
To my knowledge, never in the history of our industry has anyone attempted to use the DMCA system to take down a shipping game before. For example, when PubG sued Fortnite for copyright infringement, they didn't try to take Fortnite down with a DMCA notice.
For those not familiar with copyright law, you CANNOT copyright ideas, individual or short phrases, concepts, mechanics, game designs, etc.
Star Control: Origins is our own creation without relying on the work of Reiche or Ford. We spent 5 years working on it making it our own game. It very much plays like you would expect a Star Control game. But that has nothing to do with copyright. It has its own story, setting, plot, and all new characters. It exists in an entirely new universe.
That said, time and time again we have requested, specifically, what elements in Star Control:Origins they think their cooyright applies to. If the request wasn’t onerous, we’d be willing to comply. We have routinely done this in other games such as Galactic Civilizations where we were asked to cha be a tech name from “space marines” to something else.
Prior to release, Stardock redesigned the earth ship to appease Reiche and Ford as well as made sure none of the characters you run into were similar to what was in SC2. To date, no specific demands have been made to us.
Stardock, for the record, owns the trademark to Star Control and the copyright to Star Control 3. Even if Reiche and Ford could demonstrate they own the copyrights to SC2, that has nothing to do with us or our game. Anyone who has played the game can, we hope, attest to this.
Valve assures us that anyone who has already bought the game should be able to continue to play it.
Unfortunately, without the income from Star Control: Origins, Stardock will have to lay off some of the men and women who are assigned to the game.
We will do our very best to continue to support the game and hopefully Star Control: Origins will return as soon as possible.
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I don't know who's legally in the right, but I'm on Fred and Paul's side. They made some cool games back in the day.
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Here is a Video talking about this very thing.
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This looks like what the DMCA was actually made for? It wasn't intended as a tool to take down negative reviews of your games. It was rather made for cases like this, right?
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The issue is that the way the DMCA was used here effectively removed the game from the marketplace until the litigation over the rights dispute is resolved based on a mere allegation of belief that the game may contain infringing material.
The party that filed the DMCA notice did not need to identify what infringing material is in the game, what copyright is being infringed, etc. There is no method provided by the DMCA to restore the game because the two parties involved are already in litigation over the rights. This is effectively an injunction on the sale of the game without actually needing to even identify what is being infringed and no opportunity to bring the game back to market until the dispute is fully litigated. That is a severe financial penalty on the developer based on nothing more than an allegation.
If you enjoy playing video games, you should be concerned by what was done here. It represents a substantial threat to game development companies as any right holder could make baseless demands backed with the thread of a DMCA take down at launch and only the most deep-pocketed of developers could afford to ignore the threat.
Below is a link to a more lawyerly video on specifically the DMCA aspects. The video posted above appears to be more entertainment level of quality, although I don't understand who finds it entertaining since the bloke just reads court filings.
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So reading at your news, it will end like what Diablo 3 should have been (not the released one) with a name changed, or with money given to release it after that the lawyers from both part have met (and get their money too of course).
About copyright it depend on where you are... sadly you can copyright a product in a country but as it isn't copyrighted in another part of the world, then you can have copy that were made in the legal way and fraud sale in your country of the same production...
Exemple: When i was young a friend have done a video game copyrighted the name and in the 90' a famous company from USA sue him for having used a name used by a studio they have bought on their product. It end up with money lost in lawyer wallet to have this conclusion: both are in their right.
It's for that it is so hard that you have to get a specialist when you do it.