Dangers of Imaginary Property Laws

[owsf2000]

"The jist of it works like this: Owners of a Copyright have to defend their copyright against any form of copyright abuse--or they lose it. "

No. That is NOT how it works.

I was going to write up a lengthy note regarding the differences between patents, copyright, and trademarks (trademarks are what need to be defended or you lose it.) but instead this is all I will say in response to what someone said in the Kotaku comments regarding the Silver Lining and why Activision just HAD to crush the fan game.

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

The thing that is different, to me, about this crap with The Silver Lining is that it wasn't just some out of the blue C&D. I wouldn't really have had a problem with that, as I didn't really have much of a problem with it when Vivendi originally shut them down years ago. It was regrettable, and it annoyed the shit out of me, but things like that happen all the time.

But then, Vivendi extended them the "fan license" and let them keep going. Yay! The game didn't get killed after all! Woohoo!

And now, Activision, assholes that they are, have undone this, revoked the ability of Phoenix Online Studios to work on the game that had already been extended to them by Vivendi, and killed them again.

If what that commenter said is true and Activision "has to defend their copyright or lose it," then why the fuck was Vivendi able to create the original agreement with them? Wouldn't that have been impossible under that supposed "have to defend it or lose it" shit?

No, all this does is horribly tarnish Activision's already horribly tarnished reputation. That is all.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Oh, also. This is Activision's IP only insofar as they bought it off of Vivendi, who bought it off of Cendant/CUC, who bought it off of the original Sierra On-Line. As far as I've seen, Activision has done exactly jack and shit with the Sierra stuff so far. Not even that recent execrable Leisure Suit Larry Box Office Bust game was done by Activision (though, admittedly, that could potentially be seen as a point in their favor, them dropping that horrible piece of shit like they did).

And even if Activision does intend to do something with the various Sierra franchises in the future, I don't know that I'll ever be buying any of it outside of a used games bargain bin, if even that.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I take that back, actually.

The last month on GOG.com (http://www.gog.com) has been "Activision month (http://www.gog.com/en/page/month_of_activision)" and a good chunk of those have been old Sierra games.

So, let me revise my previous statement from "Activision has done exactly jack and shit with the Sierra stuff so far" to "Activision has done jack and shit with the Sierra stuff so far, aside from milking up to 25 year old games for minimal effort." "Minimal effort" in this case assumes that Activision had at least some hand in getting the games XP/Vista compatible and that it wasn't solely the effort of the GOG guys themselves, of course. Regardless of whether Activision had a hand in it, I'm sure they're taking a cut of the sales either way.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Looks like they weren't content to screw up the Silver Lining, they also shook up Infinity Ward by firing the people in charge. Great way to thank them for putting a billion dollars in Activision's bank account I suppose with Modern Warfare 2 but what do I know. (Yeah, plenty of articles about it over on Kotaku.)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

It used to be that EA was the Big Evil of the video games industry, no contest, but these days I honestly can't decide whether Activision has managed to steal their crown yet or not. If they haven't, they likely will soon.