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I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?

Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.

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The background is that Night Dive tried to do this back when they formed, but it turned out to be intractable for a number of reasons including no one knew who actually owned it.

What is "a proper community version"?

Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.

The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.

Nothing from the article suggests that is on the table here, but rather Nightdive wants the rights so they can sell a remake of the game without the threat of getting sued.

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