"Total Annihilation" rights are being sold!!!

Besides, zombies never seem to do what you want. They make horrible servants or minions.

Kickstarter

Over $2,000,000 not including PayPal

TA is dead, long life to PA !

In other hand, PA name is close to TA name and the gameplay is also really close.
Their is some risk that the owner of TA rights pursue Uber.

Hyundai makes cars that drive an awful lot like Honda's and their logos look sorta similar. The cars even look similar to some extent. Yet I don't think one is about to sue the other. "Close" isn't good enough in the copyright world. It needs to be an actual copy or derivative work.

There is copyright and there are trademarks.

Not so much of an problem with copyright law, you would actually need to copy the whole product (or at least distinctive parts) 1:1 before you could get in trouble.
But trademarks are much worse, don't even think remotely about creating a company which has a logo, name or color scheme which is even CLOSE to that of ANY other company in the same branch.

Total Annihilation IS a trademark (which also exists a lot longer than PA!), so you can't just create a game with a similar name and artwork without violating the trademark. The owner of the trademark is actually REQUIRED to sue you for the violation of the trademark or he will loose the trademark. (If you decide to allow a single exception, you will have trouble to defend the same trademark in the future. Heck, Apple even sued a German restaurant for having an apple in their logo because they thought that they looked to much alike. And the logos had like nothing in common... "Apfelkind" is the name of the sued restaurant, in case you want to look it up. They even had the rough shape of their devices registered as trademarks, which is much worse than their patents.)

Someone decides to buy Total Annihilation and to make use of the trademark?
Planetary Annihilation (at least the name) is gone and Uber would possibly even have to face legal consequences.

I don't see the makers of the Battlefield series suing the makers of the Call of Duty series over trademark and those games are awfully similar. Gameplay, box art, weapons, graphical style, its actually pretty hard to tell them apart.

Because there is no trademark on the type of game (that wouldn't work, to many similar games), but on the name of each series. You could not create a shooter (or any videogame) named "Call of booty" or alike without getting sued by Activision instantaneously.

If you create a name, logo or product which could profit from the resemblance to an other well known, trademark protected name, picture or product (actually only certain characteristics of the product are trademarked) from the same branch, you are in deep trouble. It gets even worse if you claim to be a "spiritual successor" or if you mention the trademark in context with your own product.

It is doubtful that anybody would buy up those rights just to make PA problems. PA can be renamed and the gameplay itself cannot be protected, so it would be easy to Uber to evade the trademark-bullet. Since the developers made TA it is natural that they mention it. 250$k Dollars is a bit too much to try this, it is very doubtful that an attacker would achieve much and even more doubtful that he would end up with a gain.

Also I don't see why you would NEED to sue anybody who violates your trademark. You could as well just officially declare that you accept product X because you like it and not accept product Y because you dislike it.

Actually I think "Call of Booty" could qualify as a protected parody if was done in a satirical style. Especially for certain definitions of "booty". :lol:

I don't think PA has tried to make itself out as being related to TA other than having similar overall gameplay and being written by some of the same people. I haven't seen "Total Annihilation" used anywhere other than as a point of reference (rarely) or as a résumé item (somewhat frequently). Ford refers to Chevy vehicles all the time in their marketing materials as points of reference and I think résumé's probably fall under the first amendment unless you signed some kind of NDA with your previous employer.

Actually trademarks don't work like that. If the defendant can show that you haven't been trying to maintain/defend your trademark in the past then the court will declare your trademark invalid. At least that's how it works in the US.

We have the Planetary Annihilation trademark already BTW.

Rockin'

Mike

aaaaaannnd....

/thread

You can't just ask X to pay a symbolic 1$ to get the rights to use it and ask Y for so much money that Y cannot pay? Sounds weird to me. Well such laws are weird. In US probably just as much as in germany.

As far as I know the owner of a trademark can license that trademark to other people under whatever terms it wants. So you could certainly license it to Bob for $1 and to Tim for $1000. You could even add an NDA to keep Bob and Tim from discussing their licensing terms with each other. Or you could just refuse to license it to Tim and and only let Bob license it.

The point is that you have to go after each infringement case and either get an injunction against them or get them to license the trademark from you. If you let even just one random person use it uncontested then you can loose the trademark completely.

I'm indifferent to the news. I doubt this includes the source code to the original game, and $250k is probably more like a starting bid. And most likely, whoever buys the trademark, they'll make a typical modern RTS in the vein of SupCom 2 that will be merely mediocre at best. I must admit though, if Chris Taylor and whatever bought it, I'd enjoy seeing what they could do with it. I hope somebody won't waste it. I highly doubt the remnant TA community has a spare $250k!


For me, the Escalation mod for TA is all the sequel that I need.

http://taesc.tauniverse.com/?p=downloads

Well, and TA: Zero, a total rebuild of the game, looks like its going to be great too but its a bit early still.

You might not want to post this on TA Universe. They would disintegrate you for such blasphemy. :shock:

I am pretty indifferent to the news. I loved TA but most of the people who enjoyed TA are likely to have heard about PA by now. By contrast it could even confuse customers who never played TA (perhaps they were too young or just never heard of it). It could actually be damaging to label a game like this as a sequel. Right now PA gets all of the fanbase and good will by being a spiritual successor to TA.

Whats more I think it is better for PA to stand as its own IP. There are precious few decent new and exciting IP's out there as it is.

The ship with TA has long sailed... Uber is creating already something new, called PA.

That will be the future reference for all upcoming RTS games.

History will show if we get a PA2 this time.

PA KINGDOMS?

LETS DO IT!

Mike