Corbon Zackery, on 18 March 2013 - 10:26 PM, said:
When battletech first came out it was produced by a company know as FASA. FASA had a low budget so it used several Robotech mechs that were copywriter in Japan by a company called Harmany Gold These mechs are dubbed the Unseen since Harmany Gold won its court case in early 1990.
That's why early games such as MechCommander and the early MechWarrior took place in 3050 so there would be no issues.
No. No! Nonononono!
Just no. This misinformation is still floating around out there, but it is nevertheless misinformation and wrong.
Harmony Gold never created Macross or anything related to it. Hell, all Harmony Gold did was take a bunch of Japanese anime series by Studio Nue (Macross, Southern Cross and Mospeada) and hack it up then put it back together as Robotech for the western market. Harmony Gold licensed these properties from Tatsunoko, who did not in fact have the right to sell as wide a license as HG believed it was buying (and Tatsunoko believed they could sell). This was a year _after_ FASA had already licensed the now infamous Unseen designs from another intermediary who worked on behalf of Studio Nue, Twentieth Century Imports.
Time passes, eventually there's the whole big mess with FASA suing Playmates for copying FASA designs for their Exosquad toyline after FASA had first gone to Playmates with a proposal for Battletech toys, some of the Playmate designs are stunningly close to FASA designs like the Mad Cat/Timberwolf, for example. Playmates was affiliated with Harmony Gold, who then sued FASA for using Macross designs.
HG _never_ won a court case about the unseen designs. Never. FASA never lost a court case concerning them, and in fact the case against Playmates was ruled in favor of FASA, but due to the mess that is legal battles between corporations they still had to pay their legal costs themselves, which was very expensive for such a small company. FASA panics at the thought of more expensive legal wrangling with HG, settles out of court and then removes _every_ mech not designed in-house, even those HG had no claim on, just to be sure nothing like this mess ever happens again.
Later on it's decided in Japanese courts that Tatsunoko did not in fact have the right to sell HG the license they did and that FASA was in fact in the right as far as their rights to use the unseen were concerned, but by now it's too late anyway and noone wants anything to do with the whole mess, not surprisingly.
See the following thread for a better explanation of it all,
http://mwomercs.com/...362#entry897362, but the long and short of it is that legal battles are expensive and will screw you over if you don't have deep pockets.
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