#Please sue his ass SEGA

[toaarcan]

So, after a literal fucking decade, Ken "Squirrel Years" Penders has finally opened preorders for The Lara-Su Chronicles.

The first (and likely only) volume is a 160-page graphic novel. 140 of those pages are reprints of the original Mobius: 25 Years Later comics, with the final page of the final story being edited to lead into 20 pages of 'original' TLSC material.

Only way this man isn't getting sued is if SEGA don't give enough of a fuck to fight him.

[randomthefox]

Could you please go into more depth on the rights issues with the Freedom Fighters? I really thought that Sega did have the rights to them, but that they weren't being used since they were made for a version of Sonic that didn't have Sega of Japan involvement leading SOJ's attitude towards them to be disdain at worst to apathy at best.

I dunno I'm not a lawyer. And neither is anybody who says that SEGA owns the rights to them.

All's I knows is that if they got "used" in any conceivable way, then Archie andor Ken Penders (since apparently he's way better at keeping his hands on ownership documentation than Archie is) would have legal grounds to demand royalties for the use of their intellectual property in a product being sold on the consumer market if not an outright cease and desist. SEGA could challenge their demands in court, but while those court proceedings are in progress any and all official work on anything involving the intellectual property under dispute would have to be halted. And these court proceedings can and do take years, and cost an ass load of money in legal fees to get it hashed out and at the end of the day a favorable ruling is never guaranteed no matter the circumstances.

So at the end of the day it's simply not worth it. IP ownership over joint venture products is never ever ever simple and clear cut, and even if it WAS simple and clear cut that wouldn't mean that the other party has no right to legal action.

Basically my understanding is if Archie were to use the Freedom Fighters then SEGA could sue, and vice versa. And considering these are massive money grubbing corporations, they absolutely WOULD sue because they'd be letting someone else eat their lunch otherwise. And the legal battle that would result would bench any products from being produced, and the whole thing would become a money sink. So it's basically a mutually assured destruction kinda thing where neither of them can launch the nukes because if they do then the other side could launch theirs.

Look at what happened when Ken Penders tried to make Scourge comic. Now imagine that but with millions of dollars worth of corporate lawyers being involved on both sides. No one wants to fucking deal with that.