70 replies to this topic

[KuroNyra]

Ok.... I've just camed back from a pause and...

What in the everliving motherbucking cockbiscuit happened to HG?! o_o'

From what I saw, they are apparently in multiple case and can't face them all right?
That mean PGI is risking to use the Marauder? And what about the Warhammer? Does it mean we have a chance of seing it?

[Alan Davion]

KuroNyra, on 15 September 2015 - 09:16 AM, said:

Ok.... I've just camed back from a pause and...

What in the everliving motherbucking cockbiscuit happened to HG?! o_o'

From what I saw, they are apparently in multiple case and can't face them all right?
That mean PGI is risking to use the Marauder? And what about the Warhammer? Does it mean we have a chance of seing it?

Russ said at the end of the Town Hall a couple weeks ago their concept art for the WHM is ready, they just won't show it until they see how well the MAD does in this sale.

Just to drive up the hype.

[Revis Volek]

LordKnightFandragon, on 15 September 2015 - 05:01 AM, said:

If I was PGI, id take the Warhammer from the 2009 MW5 video, release that as my Warhammer and make an arm inscription that says "Come at meh Bruh"!

Should really read...

"HG aint got S&%T on me!"

[TLBFestus]

MeiSooHaityu, on 15 September 2015 - 08:22 AM, said:

Makes me wonder if the resemblance between the King Crab and Marauder wasn't a coincidence. Maybe one reason the King Crab exists in MWO is to help defend the Marauder in court.

If HG tries to sue Catalyst and PGI, PGI could say..

"Well look how close it resembles our other robots *shows picture of KC*...see it looks like our other mechs and this KC looks nothing like that Gulag...thing".

Could be a thing. If it isn't, PGI, take notes if it ever comedy to a trial.

First thing I thought when I looked at it was that it has a strong resemblance to the King Crab. Shame though, I would rather it looked more like the HG product, but I can understand the reason why it doesn't.

[Lily from animove]

Raggedyman, on 15 September 2015 - 08:12 AM, said:

I heard about that one, IIRC it was to do with the art on the packaging being that of a HG Robotech image that Hasbro had licensed to them for a year back in the 80s.



some similarities, some differences

nope, I've got no clue. I guess it's for the high priced lawyers to fight out.

tbh, as similar as a commando and a spider.

[C E Dwyer]

xXBagheeraXx, on 15 September 2015 - 04:57 AM, said:

Yep, the reseens of the war-hammer where pretty sweet. Really surprised they did not release it with this pack, unless they are going to drop them separately later. *shurgs* PGI is a business but dont rip at my wallet too hard peeps.

yet to see a reseen version of a warhammer I like

[Alan Davion]

Cathy, on 15 September 2015 - 10:34 AM, said:

yet to see a reseen version of a warhammer I like

Have you seen CGL's version yet?

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

Alan Davion, on 15 September 2015 - 11:02 AM, said:

Have you seen CGL's version yet?

Exactly, CGL's new version looks just fine. And honestly, there were some decent CBT Warhammer models released after the Reseen era, that still looked relatively like the old mech.

Still HG doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. Ontop of that, we have PGI, Hairbrained, and CGL involved in any legal action, and frankly, Microsoft, as the license owner of Mechwarrior, COULD throw their hat in as well...

And I think we all know that HG couldn't stand up to Microsoft's lawyers.

[LordKnightFandragon]

KuroNyra, on 15 September 2015 - 09:16 AM, said:

Ok.... I've just camed back from a pause and...

What in the everliving motherbucking cockbiscuit happened to HG?! o_o'

From what I saw, they are apparently in multiple case and can't face them all right?
That mean PGI is risking to use the Marauder? And what about the Warhammer? Does it mean we have a chance of seing it?

They prolly went all Adolf {Godwin's Law} on the world and tried to fight a court war against like 20 different countries and suddenly found themselves horribly out numbered in manpower and material and suddenly are in a full scale retreat, even as more forces join the fight against them...

[Karyudo ds]

TLBFestus, on 15 September 2015 - 09:42 AM, said:

First thing I thought when I looked at it was that it has a strong resemblance to the King Crab. Shame though, I would rather it looked more like the HG product, but I can understand the reason why it doesn't.

Well, Studio Nue product (they own the design). HG just licenses it and protects it for their own merchandizing. Personally I like it's shape in general but I'm happy with it not being completely recycled and this actually looks like a better fit in a way to me. The center cannon just bothers me when the rules don't actually support it and it's not a turret in the rules... sort of wish CGL didn't keep that nonsense (or have the rules support it).

[1453 R]

LordKnightFandragon, on 15 September 2015 - 11:29 AM, said:

They prolly went all Adolf {Godwin's Law} on the world and tried to fight a court war against like 20 different countries and suddenly found themselves horribly out numbered in manpower and material and suddenly are in a full scale retreat, even as more forces join the fight against them...

This isn't Lawyer War II

But yes - there's not really much HG can realistically do at this point. The backlash, in NA at least, against just this sort of weasel-lipped horse manure 'copyright claim' has been growing ever more steadily recently, HG's case was always questionable, and now 3+ companies (who knows who else might want a piece?!) are all throwing their hat into the ring at once. They've only got so many lawyers, and this soon after Hasbro biting their hand off I can't imagine any of them are eager to test the courts proper.

Harmony Gold's stranglehold on these 'Mechs is pretty much done. The CGL initiative, at least has been out long enough that Harmony Gold should've done something about it by now if they were going to do anything at all - the length of uncontested time CGL's been selling this stuff is, by this point, a strong point in CGL's favor in a legal case. You can't defend a copyright months after it's been breached and expect the courts to humor you, especially on a copyright you know bloody damn well you shouldn't be holding, over an issue that everyone bloody damn well knows should never have been a legal matter in the first place.

We may not yet be completely in the clear...but we're at the part where we can see the clear pretty plainly from here, and there's not many places left for Harmony Gold's demon hordes to hide between here and In The Clear.

[Escef]

To be fair to Harmony Gold, I'm sure they paid a lot of money for that license. So I don't blame them for their history of defending it. However, the rabid way they did so earned them no friends, and I have as little sympathy for them as any.

[Agent 0 Fortune]

Raggedyman, on 15 September 2015 - 03:42 AM, said:

Apologies if it's already been answered but does anyone know what changed to let the Marauder and Warhammer be added to the game?

Judging by the artwork 33%
I read somewhere (possibly on these forums) that similar art only needs to differ by 33% to avoid IP infringment.

[Elizander]

I think it's 36% but somewhere near there. It's definitely far different from the original which is spindly.

[1453 R]

Escef, on 15 September 2015 - 11:42 AM, said:

To be fair to Harmony Gold, I'm sure they paid a lot of money for that license. So I don't blame them for their history of defending it. However, the rabid way they did so earned them no friends, and I have as little sympathy for them as any.

Want to laugh?

I started as a Robotech fan; the first giant-fighting-robots thing I was ever exposed to was Toonami's old Robotech airings way back in the annals of my childhood. BattleTech branched off from that when my folks made the later-regretted decision to buy me a MW2 compilation pack on a lark.

harmony Gold's tragic mishandling of the Macross franchise, and their snarling, frothing hatred for anything BattleTech and the patently unfair and hostile things that hatred had them doing, soured me on Robotech. I was, technically, their customer first, and they lost me by being asshammers.

That's what they get for being asshammers.

[RussianWolf]

1453 R, on 15 September 2015 - 11:39 AM, said:

The backlash, in NA at least, against just this sort of weasel-lipped horse manure 'copyright claim' has been growing ever more steadily recently,

Now if only the Beatles fans would rise against the company that that legally "stole" the use of their record label logo in the music industry.....

Elizander, on 15 September 2015 - 11:57 AM, said:

I think it's 36% but somewhere near there. It's definitely far different from the original which is spindly.

I don't believe there is a hard percentage. It really comes down to if an average person could confuse the one for the other.

[Steinar Bergstol]

1453 R, on 15 September 2015 - 12:00 PM, said:

Want to laugh?

I started as a Robotech fan; the first giant-fighting-robots thing I was ever exposed to was Toonami's old Robotech airings way back in the annals of my childhood. BattleTech branched off from that when my folks made the later-regretted decision to buy me a MW2 compilation pack on a lark.

harmony Gold's tragic mishandling of the Macross franchise, and their snarling, frothing hatred for anything BattleTech and the patently unfair and hostile things that hatred had them doing, soured me on Robotech. I was, technically, their customer first, and they lost me by being asshammers.

That's what they get for being asshammers.

Pretty much this. You're not alone in being turned away by HG's behavior, as their recent attempt to kickstart a new Robotech show proved. It was a massive failure and they pulled it before it even reached the end. Hell, they even set up a an anti-supporter tier where for 1$ you could post in their kickstarter comment field about why you didn't like them. _That_ turned around and bit them in the arse right quick as the comment field filled up with so many "I love Robotech, but I wouldn't piss on Harmony Gold to save them if they were on fire" comments that it seemed _most_ of the money they were getting was from that 1$ "hate tier".

Hell, Macross fans have, if possible, an even bigger hateboner for HG than Battletech fans have thanks to HG over the years blocking any attempt to bring over other Macross products which have little to do with the original series from Japan. All because HG have been insisting on their "We own _EVERYTHING_ Macross outside of Japan, EVERYTHING!" stance for years.

The moral of the story is if you're going to be an ****** then people will treat you like an ******.

[DiGCliff]

honestly have only recently meaning withing the last 3 ish months started playing the game, but i have known about battle tech for years, iv wanted to buy in for a bit but am a little unsure of where to start. anyway getting to the point why would HG arrest pGI,s forward momentum. in my eyes it could only help sails of the battle tech table top game if they fill this game with all kind of mechs from battle tech,

like for instance say someone likes the centurion in game then he says you know what i like this a great deal maybe i want a figure of it then he goes and gets a nice battle tech centurion to place on his desk and smile at when he goes to play the game .

just seems kinda counter intuitive to me

Edited by DiGCliff, 15 September 2015 - 01:03 PM.

[1453 R]

RussianWolf, on 15 September 2015 - 12:36 PM, said:

I don't believe there is a hard percentage. It really comes down to if an average person could confuse the one for the other.

And realistically, even without a Ph.D. in fake robots like most of us around here have, showing someone art for the Glaug and art for Piranha's MAD-3R would result in them figuring the two were similar - maybe related - but certainly not the same machine. Not unless they were blind idiots.

So...let's not do this test in California, then...

[1453 R]

DiGCliff, on 15 September 2015 - 12:56 PM, said:

honestly have only recently meaning withing the last 3 ish months started playing the game, but i have know about battle tech for years, iv wanted to buy in for a bit but am a little unsure of where to start. anyway getting to the point why would HG arrest pGI,s forward momentum. in my eyes it could only help sails of the battle tech table top game if they fill this game with all kind of mechs from battle tech,

like for instance say someone likes the centurion in game then he says you know what i like this a great deal maybe i want a figure of it then he goes and gets a nice battle tech centurion to place on his desk and smile at when he goes to play the game .

just seems kinda counter intuitive to me

Harmony Gold has nothing to do with the BattleTech tabletop game. They own* the rights to overseas distribution of the Macross/Robotech franchise. A long time ago, FASA Corporation had the bad idea to try and license Japanese mecha art from other series for their initial BattleTech TROs. When Harmony Gold acquired the rights to the Robotech series proper, as opposed to FASA's claim on just the art, it turned into a big nasty legal snarl that cost FASA their art rights and forced the BattleTech franchise to discontinue any use of the art for these classic 'Mechs. Resulting in THIS problem, termed 'the Unseen' by the BattleTech community.

It was actually a big learning experience for the anime export industry as a whole - everybody saw this and went "holy hell, we need to not do that again" on both sides of the pond. The problem that arose from this initial problem is that rather than being reasonable, saying "yeah, everybody kinda got screwed over here since nobody had any idea how to do this properly. Here - rotate the art 'bout twenty degrees, maybe move the cannon on that Marauder, put a round searchlight instead of a square on on the Warhammer, and don't do transforming versions of this stuff, and we'll be all right," Harmony Gold as a company went on record as saying "F*** YOU, F*** YOUR FRANCHISE, F*** YOUR FANBASE, AND F*** YOUR MOTHERS. WE OWN MACROSS, AND ANYONE WHO COMES WITHIN TWENTY MILES OF THAT COPYRIGHT IS GOING TO RUE THE DAY THEY FIRST DREW BREATH " prior to sending about a million and nine vampiric lawyers to suck the financial lifeblood out of whoever transgressed against rights they did not, actually, have a clear and unambiguous claim to in the first place.

As I recall, even Studio Nue didn't want HG getting the rights - the court proceedings fell out such that Robotech's original creators were as stuck with HG as anyone else.

Robotech's creators hate HG. Robotech's fanbase, both Japanese and overseas, hate HG. BattleTech's creators and fanbase hate HG, because HG has been holding anything remotely like the images of the original 3025 TRO 'Mechs hostage for over twenty years. Pretty much everybody hates HG, mostly because their business practices resemble a Kodiak bear defending a month-old moose carcass while somehow, bizarrely, not actually eating that carcass. Just...letting it rot.

yeah. Bad situation all around. I honestly feel bad for Robotech fans.