Brad_Wardell: Brad_Wardell: Stardock “claims” vs. Paul and Fred’s claims being treated as facts

Yeah, that’s probably fair. A lot of it is really a matter of my style shifting as I went through the documents. I started with P&F’s counterclaim because it had the most dated information. I’ll see if I can tune it better.

I saw that Singer Associates tweet. What was the date on that? Was it deleted, because I can’t seem to find it now.

Now that Paul & Fred have just gone and made settlement offers from both sides public, I have to say, the Stardock one is essentially a “You give us all the toys” proposal. The “correcting statement” is the cherry on top: “We’ve given Stardock all the content they’ve been insisting publicly they don’t want, and we know they’re going to make an amazing game with it because they’re geniuses.”

I don’t know how settlement negotiations typically go, so maybe all that’s just the equivalent of starting absurdly high when you’re haggling.

Did I get swamped in the legalese of Paul & Fred’s settlement, because I didn’t see anywhere where it said they needed to inspect the game builds for infringements. Maybe that’s a stipulation they made in the settlement discussions, to enforce the terms? I understand it’s something they requested several months ago.

The ship builder is a tough issue. If I were Paul & Fred and I were looking for a reasonable, good faith resolution there, this would be my thinking:

While it’s not part of the classic Star Control experience, a ship builder is a feature with legitimate value in a space game. So it’s not just there to provide a backdoor way to make SC2 ships in Origins. I would demand that Stardock doesn’t put pieces in the component list that clearly represent distinctive parts of SC1/2 ships in shape and color pattern. No butterfly wing parts with the ridges just the same as the Pkunk ship, for instance. (Keep in mind, I don’t know exactly how the ship builder operates.) And then I’d just have to be lenient, because players are going to find a way to make the closest thing to a Pkunk ship they can. But that’s player content for you. They’re also going to make the Enterprise and Firefly and X-Wings. Tributes are tributes.