If the potential victory from a lawsuit is $20K and Activision estimates it will cost them $50K to find this piece of paper, is the company relatively safe from a lawsuit?
But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
Ignoring such letters will result in absolutely nothing. The trick is to know which is which, and that is why you ask an attorney.
If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.
In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
Says you. But companies can be extreme maximalists when it comes to copyright, and burn money just to "hit 1 to 'educate' 100".
Shut up.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
It's all risk-adjusted cost/benefit, and there is almost no practical benefit to taking the risk. Yes, it would be nice to clear up the legal ownership rights and to have a non-pirated version available. But as an economic matter, there is almost no value.
(Fox, one of the possible rights holders, was acquired by Disney in 2019.)
I think proving that proving they had the rights at some time could be sufficient because it is impossible to prove they never sold them.
Yes, but see below.
> If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
No, but complex. Legally the contract is still valid, but they still need to show the court what the details are. All parties to a contracts get a copy, and so Activation can legally force other people who should have a copy of the contract to produce it, any copy is enough (or several partially rat eaten copies may be enough to reproduce what the original said). Activision has all the time they want to find copies of the contract (unlike trademark, copyright isn't use it or lose it), so you are risking the above for a long time. Sometimes enough testimony in court of we did have a contract is enough - when it is obvious there must have been a contract at one time the court will put together obvious details which might be enough to sue. In this case the 3 parties can agree that while they don't know who as rights between the 3 of them the rights must be contained and so they can agree to a 3-way split for purposes of going to court - even if it latter turns out only one party had rights, that party agreed to the split (though if you years latter can prove a 4th party has rights they can sue the other 3).
Of course if rats did eat all copies of the contract the lawyer fees to figure this out are likely more than the game is worth and so it probably isn't worthwhile to sue, so practically it may be as if they no longer have rights to the game just because they can't afford to enforce it. This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
People keep on insisting when it comes to these things that various things are risky in a rather handwavey way but they never fully come out and articulate the risks.
I asked this question to ChatGPT a bunch of ways and tried to understand what the specifics are when people say this is risky and I can't really seem to get to anything that is a nuclear level risk, just a garden variety risk that you need to manage amongst all the other garden variety risks involved in running a business (when inputted with a reasonable set of realistic assumptions, it's possible to create assumptions where this is a nuclear level risk but that doesn't seem to apply to the majority of real world cases, including this one).
Willful copyright infringement means liability for statutory damages, compensatory damages, claims on all profits, and legal fees (yours and theirs).
(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, chatgpt is a very bad lawyer).
The worse case is if they have a registered copyright which means they get to charge triple damages. I'm not completely clear on what triple damages mean. I think that means they subtract your costs to publish the game and count only the profits, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if they assume your costs, or what they would have charged if they had done this (that is if you sell the game for $50 but they would charge $100) - you can bet their lawyers will argue for whatever gets them the most, and may also ask for lawyer fees.
For a small company the above will bankrupt you.