saintdane05 said:
Well, there's the fact that he was using Ubisoft's money to make the game. That kind of counts. If stuff works like this,<link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_G.I._Joe>This guy should get all money from the GI Joe stuff.
Plus, he wasn't the "Creator". There are hundreds of "Creators" on a team. A game does not rely on the input of one person. A game is made by teams. Even Minecraft. And most indie games.
Well, G.I. means "General Issue" in the military and "Joe" is what foreigners called Americans and came to mean a sort of everyman. "G.I. Joe" meaning pretty much he average infantryman, and as I understand things the G.I. Joe action figures were not connected to that movie but a line of dolls where the term was used because it was then generic and fit into their jingle "G.I. Joe, fighting soldier from head to toe" which was a gimmick to sell dolls to boys by putting them in then-authentic representations of actual military uniforms.
The point being that the term couldn't really be copyrighted, not to mention that it was before we had Langsdell-type copyright trolls. Now the rights to the "modern" G.I. Joe where they turned it into a sort of super-hero premise could get pretty interesting if someone wanted to fight that out more seriously. Apparently there were already battles between comic creators, cartoon creators, and toy manufacturers over the rights, names, and likenesses of some of the characters due to the fact that the rights to produce "canon" were apparently sold and held by multiple people at the same time. I'm no expert on it, but I remember reading some stuff about it, by way of an explanation of why G.I. Joe went through a period where it more or less disappeared from TV before being resurrected later with the "Extreme" line after my time and such.
It should also be noted that it's also why I think the politically correct goofs that did the G.I. Joe movies insulted the franchise and it's backround. In an attempt to be politically correct and sell the movie better globally G.I. Joe was defined as being a multi-national armed force of UN peacekeepers if I remember. That's hilarious given that the very name is "General Issue American" (which was funny to begin with). It was also supposed to always by it's nature supposed to be a very nationalist and ultra-patriotic concept despite some members being on loan from various US allies (but I believe even then dual citizenship was required which came up in one of the comics or "novels" if I remember vaguely. Something about "Quick Kick" who was a Chinese actor/martial artist patterned loosely off Jackie Chan/Bruce Lee being booted until he could get dual citizenship, but still working with the team unofficially, and then things ending with him giving the pledge of Alliegience as he joined officially... it's been a long time though).
At any rate, however many details I might have wrong there aside, when it comes to Ubisoft I pretty much "get" how this happened. At the end of the day ideas start with one person even if other people might tweak them later. Video games tend to have one "lead writer" who came up with the initial concepts, characters, etc... and in some cases a big deal is even made if someone famous like say "Clive Barker" or "Steven King" came up with the ideas and/or concept. In general the guy who makes the pitch to get a team assembled is usually the creator/idea man. I don't doubt that this guy pretty much created the whole "1666" idea and that it goes back to him, however in today's increasingly corporate environment producers generally don't want to risk/invest money in something they don't control. This is the key to "intellectual property rights" where a creator typically gives up their ownership of an idea in order to get it made. This is done specifically to avoid cases like where this guy left Ubisoft, and took his idea with him, with Ubisoft thus likely losing all the money and man hours they had invested in the project.
In short it appears what happened was this guy got a better deal from THQ which he didn't realize was in trouble. He was lucky and didn't have his IP tied to Ubisoft at the time, so he stabbed them in the back and went to work for the competition. THQ probably demanded that he sign over the rights to them though when he transferred as part of the better deal. THQ collapsed and got bought out by Ubisoft which has a grudge having been stabbed in the back, and also now owns the rights as part of THQ's assets since the creator had given them to THQ at least in part.
It's really hard to take a side here without knowing what was said and to whom behind closed doors, the kind of information we're never likely to hear. At the end of the day it seems to me that Ubisoft is likely to win this one legally. Morally... well, these kinds of pitfalls are what creators have to worry about throughout the entire "fandom" industries (comics, anime, games, etc...) a lot has been said about it here and there over the years. I can see both sides of it as the industries are full of both creators and publishers being the "villain" of stories where things have gone sour.
