{"id":6939,"date":"2017-12-04T22:20:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T22:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/310964"},"modified":"2017-12-04T22:20:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-04T22:20:00","slug":"creators-of-star-control-accuse-stardock-of-publishing-games-without-permission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2017\/12\/04\/creators-of-star-control-accuse-stardock-of-publishing-games-without-permission\/","title":{"rendered":"Creators of Star Control accuse Stardock of publishing games without permission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Creators of <em>Star Control<\/em> Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/dogarandkazon.squarespace.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/1\/there-were-many-great-battles-and-some-of-them-involved-lawyers\">have made a statemen<\/a>t claiming\u00a0they are in &#8220;legal conflict&#8221; with Stardock, accusing the game and software development company of publishing their earlier games without permission.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamesindustry.biz\/articles\/2017-12-04-star-control-devs-accuse-stardock-of-selling-games-unlawfully\">Stardock\u00a0acquired Atari&#8217;s rights for the\u00a0<em>Star Control<\/em>\u00a0IP<\/a>\u00a0at a bankruptcy auction back in 2013, although Ford and Reiche\u00a0say that &#8220;Atari\u2019s rights to publish our earlier games terminated over a decade before the auction and we contend that Stardock has zero rights to our games, including any code and other IP we created.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>President and CEO of Stardock\u00a0Brad Wardell <a href=\"https:\/\/forums.starcontrol.com\/486284\/Stardock-response-to-Paul-and-Fred\">responded to the duo&#8217;s claim<\/a>, saying &#8220;for the entirety of the time we have held the rights, they have been getting paid for those sales. If they had an objection to the games being sold this is something that could and should have been addressed before we were ever involved.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The post by Wardell goes on to state that &#8220;many assets were transferred to us including the various publishing agreements to the <em>Star Control<\/em> franchise. The short version is that the classic IP is messy.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In response to the accusations, digital distributor GOG.com has announced that it will remove <em>Star Control 1, 2,<\/em> and <em>3<\/em> from its storefront on Tuesday, December 5th.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Creators of Star Control Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III\u00a0have made a statement claiming\u00a0they are in &#8220;legal conflict&#8221; with Stardock, accusing the game and software development company of publishing their earlier games without permission. Stardock\u00a0acquired Atari&#8217;s rights for the\u00a0Star Control\u00a0IP\u00a0at a bankruptcy auction back in 2013, although Ford and Reiche\u00a0say that &#8220;Atari\u2019s rights to publish [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}