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Comment by lixue | Hacker News Reader

"For example, available data suggests P/R didn't actually substantially contribute to SC1/2."

That's a pretty wild claim to repeat. Not a single person on the original team agrees with it, and they've filed the copyright registration in court[1]. There's basically no evidence at all for that conclusion, except that Stardock made the claim (not supported it, not provided evidence of it, merely made the claim)

Even if you do believe it, it's legally irrelevant as the team has signed the copyright over to them[2], and they released The Ur-Quan Masters back in 2003 using that copyright.

I was a member of the community back in the lat 90s/early 00s and this was common knowledge even back then.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6239751/71/6/stardock-s...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6239751/64/5/stardock-s...

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Stardock has acted like scum through the whole ordeal. On top of the lawsuit against P/R...

1. They attempted to trick the UQM project leadership into signing a document that said Stardock owned the rights to everything in Star Control II. Stardock would then "generously" license rights back to the UQM project as "protection". In reality it would put the free game under Stardock's thumb[1]

2. There are leaked conversations of the owner of Stardock labeling the UQM forum and star-control.com as hostile to his company and how he is going to shut them down

3. There are two subreddits for Star Control. The fan owned /r/starcontrol and the Stardock owned /r/StarControlOfficial. An unknown reddit account took over /r/starcontrol under strange circumstances and sowed havoc for a couple of days before reddit intervened and removed the new mod. There are theories that Stardock was behind it.

[1] http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=7396.0

That sounds like a fair take, IANAL.

It's worth noting these registrations are dated 2017/2018, after the mud-flinging began. I wouldn't be shocked to hear they're invalid.

I really can't think of any reason they'd be invalid.Keep in mind copyright doesn't need to be registered to be valid - the actual copyright applies since they created the work, this is just a formal registration of that.

There's also a ton of evidence supporting this copyright: The game CDs, manual, and box art all also say copyright Fred & Paul; there's email threads with Accolade discussing the possibility of merging the copyright and trademark; the fact that they published the game with no change other than removal of the "Star Control" trademark; and basically the entire team signing off on this.

If someone else was claiming to have written it, I could see a credible conflict, but literally everyone involved in the actual creation of the game says that, yes, it was created by Fred & Paul.

Cool, thanks for the calm discourse lixue.

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