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-Mud
ex-Jade Falcon
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ralgith
Blighted Sun Battalion
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"Ralgith's Renegades"
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 Posted: 21-Apr-2004 19:40 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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The fact does remain however that the decision to remove the artwork was made before the settlement, and was for more reasons than the lawsuit. Of course it was a large influence on the decision I'm sure. However, and I don't know this as fact its only something I was told when I first got into battletech and never bothered to research because I didnt care, anyways, I was told that the license that FASA had turned out to be legit so they could have one the lawsuit. I don't know if that is true, and I still don't care heh. Would be interesting if anyone out there knows if this is fact or not.
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Blighted Sun Battalion
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Gunslinger Patch
Royal Black Watch Regiment
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| Posted: 23-Apr-2004 23:44 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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Heh, that takes me back a ways.
The funny part is that the original owners of Macross later sued the hell out of Harmony Gold in a japanese court, saying that HG never had the rights to international macross or Btech stuff to begin with and won easily in that japanese court.
The ending is that insofar as Japan law is concerned HG never had the rights to anything they sued FASA for to begin with, which would kind of cancel the unseen lawsuit, but by the time this happened FASA was already dead and Whiz Kids and Fanpro were doing Battletech.
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Gunslinger Patch
Royal Black Watch Regiment
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| Posted: 23-Apr-2004 23:53 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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Basically, if I recall correctly, Harmony Gold got hold of that crappy cartoon show and the rights to the toy line that flopped right alongside the cartoon show, as well as the rights to some macross stuff. Then they turned around and sued FASA for violating THEIR rights to battletech, like it wasn't FASA who invented Btech in the first place. FASA didn't have large bags of money like HG did, so they had to cave and remove the unseen.
I always thought what really happened is that Harmony Gold tried to run FASA into the ground with harrasment lawsuits for the purpose of forcing FASA to be sold over to HG so they could get their hands on Btech. They pretty much did run FASA into the ground, but they never got to force a change of ownership.
What upset a lot of us oldtimers, is that all they legally had to remove was the images of the unseen. But they went beyond that and also removed any mech they didn't own fully or that had not been fully created within FASA to avoid the same problem cropping up again. They said that only the artwork would be gone, but after that the new novels had no archers, warhammers, etc. in them, the unseen were just gone from the universe.
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-Mud
ex-Jade Falcon
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| Posted: 25-Apr-2004 00:50 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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FASA may have saw it as an opportunity to promote the "new" mechs as well. In any case, that is certainly the strategy they took. Unfortunately, none of the new 'mechs looked cool at all. The last set of good looking 'mechs FASA came up with were the original omnimechs.
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Slythis
Federated Suns
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| Posted: 25-Apr-2004 13:46 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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On 2004-04-23 23:53, Gunslinger Patch wrote:
Basically, if I recall correctly, Harmony Gold got hold of that crappy cartoon show and the rights to the toy line that flopped right alongside the cartoon show
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I know some people who would rip your throat out for calling it a cartoon. Aside from that Macross (or Robotech as it's known in America) was far from a flop the problem was that HG didn't market it to the right people so it wasn't shown during the times that their target audiance would be watching. So it created a cult following among people who weren't interested in the Toys, then HG pulled the series and the Toys b/c it wasn't making the kind of money that they thought it should.
FASA had perfectly legal rights to the images from Macross which they recieved from the original publisher of Macross. The problem was that FASA couldn't afford the Lawyers and had no grounds to counter sue because they didn't OWN the rights to the images. If I recall correctly the original publish of Macross sued HG as soon as they found out about HG's Lawsuit against FASA but with the Legal system in Japan working the about same as ours the Settlement had already been reached before the first hearing took place in Japan and by the time it reached the highest courts FASA was gone and it didn't make any differance.
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Ruger
Lyran Alliance
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| Posted: 25-Apr-2004 13:55 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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>> Aside from that Macross (or Robotech as it's known in America) >>
Not quite...Macross and Robotech are two completely different series, with different plot lines, even if the translation of much of the "Macross" portion of Robotech changed little from the original series...
Superdimensional Fortress Macross also has a fairly large following in America...but Robotech was more than just Macross...the "Macross" portion of the show was only the first 36 episodes of Robotech...
Ruger
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Slythis
Federated Suns
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| Posted: 25-Apr-2004 14:13 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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You are correct, but they generally refer to the universe as "Robotech" here in the US, which kind of makes me wonder if HG wasn't trying to Provoke FASA into using them over the name.
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Gunslinger Patch
Royal Black Watch Regiment
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| Posted: 26-Apr-2004 12:26 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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Quote:
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On 2004-04-25 13:46, Slythis wrote:
If I recall correctly the original publish of Macross sued HG as soon as they found out about HG's Lawsuit against FASA but with the Legal system in Japan working the about same as ours the Settlement had already been reached before the first hearing took place in Japan and by the time it reached the highest courts FASA was gone and it didn't make any differance.
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I know, I already said that.
Originally, the original owner of Macross knew about Btech using their images to make a game. And they said it was okay as long as it was just the images being used and the names and such were pure Battletech.
What I never got was how HG could get the rights to the cartoon show and the toys and then claim that FASA doing Btech violated their copyright to Btech. They didn't just sue for violation of the macross copyright, but for that show and the toys too. They didn't have a copyright, they had a license, the inventors of Battletech were the ones with the copyright.
Whether they sued over the show and toys or macross, either way they should have had their case shot down pretty quick in any court. You can't sue the creators and owners for violating the right to use something they created and never sold off and you can't sue for violating a macross copyright when the macross creators gave FASA permission to use the artwork. If the courts worked, what should have happened was FASA suing right back for petty and illegal harrassment and taking all of HG's money in revenge for their BS. Instead, the one with the biggest bag of money won the arguement regardless of who had merit and who clearly did not.
It all makes me wonder how much of HG's big bag of money went to the judge as well as to their lawyers.
And I saw that show, the graphics were pretty, but the cartoon was crappy. Little of it was faithful to the Btech universe, such as house mechs on the wrong sides of battles. And the toys were done as badly. The elemental for instance was the same size as a Mauler. I think it was Tyco that did the toys and they made the same mistake the cartoon did, they kiddyfied it. They aimed it at little kids instead of at us players, teenagers and adults. So they had kiddyfied plots and kiddyfied plastic action figures instead of real plots and quality collector style toys that us Btech players would have liked to buy and collect.
[ This Message was edited by: Gunslinger Patch on 2004-04-27 19:46 ]
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Slythis
Federated Suns
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| Posted: 26-Apr-2004 13:45 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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Maybe they thought they had exclusive rights to the images, in which case the lawsuit makes a lot more sense... it was still stupid but thats really the only logical reason I can think of.
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Gunslinger Patch
Royal Black Watch Regiment
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| Posted: 27-Apr-2004 19:50 Post subject: RE: The Unseen Lawsuit |
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I could be wrong, its been a while. But I think what HG had was the international rights to macross, for outside of Japan. And that the original macross owners had not been interested in marketing it outside japan very much and sued HG for trying to do that with some sort of marketing license that HG had acquired second, third, or 4th hand and then acted like they owned the whole thing when they did not, or something like that.
I remember once making a few posts in a very long and detailed thread about this subject either here or on at the Heavymetalpro site. I think it may have been the thread that put out a call to bring back the unseen? The thread that got the credit for causing Project Phoenix to happen perhaps?
(edit) For some reason I keep typing HQ instead of HG.
[ This Message was edited by: Gunslinger Patch on 2004-04-27 19:54 ]
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