Stardock Systems, Inc. v. Reiche

Stardock Systems, Inc. v. Reiche
Court	United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Full case name	Stardock Systems, Inc. v. Paul Reiche III and Robert Frederick Ford
Decided	December 27, 2018
Citation(s)	Stardock Systems, Inc. v. Reiche, No. 17-cv-07025-SBA, 2018 WL 7348858 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 27, 2018)[1]
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Saundra Brown Armstrong
Keywords
United States copyright law, United States trademark law, Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Stardock Systems, Inc. v. Paul Reiche III and Robert Frederick Ford, 2018 WL 7348858 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 27, 2018), is a case where the United States District Court for the Northern District of California applied American intellectual property law to the contents and sale of computer games. Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford are the makers of the critically acclaimed 1990 Star Control game series, and Stardock is the maker of the 2018 release Star Control: Origins. The lawsuit stems from a dispute over the ownership, licensing, and infringement of the Star Control intellectual property, including both trademarks and copyrights.

In the 1990s, Reiche and Ford licensed their copyrights to publisher Accolade, to create Star Control 3 without their involvement. That license expired in the early 2000s when the games stopped being sold, allowing Reiche and Ford to re-release their assets as the open source The Ur-Quan Masters. Around this time, Accolade and their Star Control trademark were acquired by Atari SA. Years later, Stardock purchased Atari's Star Control assets in a 2013 bankruptcy auction, and began developing their Origins game. In late 2017, Stardock's disagreement with Reiche and Ford escalated towards a legal battle, with each party asserting that the other was violating their intellectual property rights: Stardock was selling the original games on Steam without Reiche and Ford's consent, whereas Reiche and Ford announced Ghosts of the Precursors as a sequel to Star Control II without Stardock's consent. After Stardock filed a lawsuit on December 8, 2017, the dispute escalated to include the contents of the games, with Reiche and Ford counter-claiming Stardock misappropriated their characters and designs in Origins, and Stardock further claiming ownership over trademarks in the aliens from the original Star Control games.

In late 2018, Stardock applied for injunctive relief to protect Origins from a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown notice, which was denied by Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong. Reiche and Ford issued an uncontested notice soon after, and both Steam and GOG.com removed the games from their stores. Soon after, Stardock agreed to indemnify the digital sales platforms from litigation, who restored Origins to sale. In June 2019, the parties came to a mutual settlement agreement. Stardock would own the Star Control trademark, and drop their claims to the alien names from the original series. Reiche and Ford would own the copyrights in Star Control I and II, and the parties would avoid using characters or stories that might infringe on each other's separate games. Reiche and Ford agreed to refrain from any announcements about Ghosts of the Precursors for a few years, which would be renamed as part of the agreement.