Comment by mandevil
1 day ago
They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes. The chances of Activision actually pulling the trigger and suing if you made a remastered version are definitely less than 50-50. They'd have to actually have owned the rights in the first place, they still have the documentation to prove it, and that they'd find a suit a profitable idea? Let's say it's a 1/3 chance. That means if you publish it, you'd have a 2/3 chance of not getting sued by Activision, that can have a positive E(V) if you just go ahead and YOLO it.
But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
It is reasonably sure that each party has a 90% chance of suing if they have rights. There is a 90% chance someone will send you a cease and desist just because all 3 are the type that will do it if they think they have rights. There is a reasonable chance more than 1 will send a cease and desist (some weaselly "we are still checking rights but if we have them your notice starts now - just enough to avoid fraud if it turns out they don't have rights)
OK, but according to ChatGPT (so correct me if the AI is wrong), if you ignore the cease and desist, then the process goes into default judgement where the claimants now need to prove standing to collect judgement. You now know with 100% certainty that they need to hire someone to dig through a file vault at Iron Mountain to collect judgment and they're not going to bother doing that so the default judgement means nothing and you can go about your merry way ignoring their cease and desist.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that is wrong. Still consult a lawyer if you need real legal advice.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
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How do you get to 100 percent certainty that they won't do that, or that they need to go through the file vault at all? What if someone just needs to find it in an email server or etc?
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> OK, but according to ChatGPT
Shut up.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
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Why would you set the probability at 1/3rd? It feels closer to 1/100 at most.
They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
What you’re describing is a risk/reward approach to decision making. But in practice many execs do not follow this calculus.
> They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes.
I think proving that proving they had the rights at some time could be sufficient because it is impossible to prove they never sold them.
It feels like the right thing to do is to preemptively sue all three for a declaratory judgement, similar to obtaining a "quiet title" for a piece of real estate. Then they can put up or shut up. The right thing to do if you're trying to remaster the game, that is. The right thing to do if you just want to play it is to pirate.
I'm sorry, you want to get into an IP lawsuit with the Walt Disney Company, by choice? You think that starting a fight with the most fearsome collection of IP lawyers on the planet is the right thing to do?
(Fox, one of the possible rights holders, was acquired by Disney in 2019.)
How much should the preemptive-plaintiff be willing to spend to get the declaratory judgement? And why would one expect to win? It is very clear that some combination of the three companies have the rights, and all they have to do is agree collectively to win. Each firm individually probably spends more on lawyers every month than normal people do in their lifetime. They have lawyers on staff, so their marginal cost of being hasslesome to you in court is near zero.
It's all risk-adjusted cost/benefit, and there is almost no practical benefit to taking the risk. Yes, it would be nice to clear up the legal ownership rights and to have a non-pirated version available. But as an economic matter, there is almost no value.
Yes, I get that the legal system can be horrible and adds some pretty ridiculous overhead and costs. I was just pointing out there is a path to actually clear this thing up - a process to give the possible-rightsholders notice that they have to actually respond with concrete evidence or drop the matter, rather than lazily sending "we might care" nastygrams. And doing that that would certainly be much less than being on the receiving end of a lawsuit with damages after paying for development.