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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I have a feeling enforcement of antitrust laws are about to become a hot topic in the next election cycle.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely a departure from his usual art style, which tends to be heavily streamlined and vaguely organic with few hard corners or sharp edges. There are a few touches here and there that remind me a bit of his work on Aquarion Evol and particularly Nobunaga the Fool, like the bits coming off of the shoulders. All in all, it feels more evocative of lazy American SF robot design work like classic BattleTech or the ambulatory cardboard box designs of Yuji Shinkawa. It just looks painfully generic.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Blech... well, I guess even an ace designer can totally phone it in at times. I honestly thought it was Yuji Shinkawa's handiwork until the credits page at the end. "Boxy" isn't usually a word that comes in the same sentence with "Shoji Kawamori".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Oddly, it just doesn't feel like E3 without Spotpass Miis of Nintendo's various creators and talking PR heads to pester me on a daily basis like we had on the 3DS. I kinda wish we could get a port of the Zero Escape remaster that came out for PS4 a while ago... I followed that series on the DS and 3DS.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    We've had one already. It was called Macross Plus, and it was f***ing awesome. Arguably better than Thunderbolt, since it came without a walking edgelord meme for a protagonist.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Motive always matters... though I suppose it's really just a matter of degrees of human awfulness. As far as what's being written on the subject, it's worth remembering the old truism that the news exists to sell itself. They're going to approach a subject like this from the most attention-grabbing angle even if it's not strictly 100% accurate. "Racists harass Star Wars actress into shutting down her Instagram account" makes the whole affair sound MUCH more dramatic and newsworthy than the more honest but markedly less bombastic "Immature Star Wars fans harass Star Wars actress into shutting down her Instagram". The Internet Hate Machine makes for better headlines than a bunch of neckbeards who are calling her nasty names because they think her character sucks. Well that's good to hear. If Star Trek is busily forgetting its roots and making xenophobia a virtue, maybe a more inclusive Galaxy Far Far Away is in order. I don't know... my read of the dynamic between Finn and Rose in The Last Jedi was definitely more towards a romantic relationship. The kiss and all, well, hard to write that off as big sister-ly when she idolizes him like that.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The schtick with the New Republic missing the First Order's military buildup is especially bad, because they literally did an entire movie devoted to the premise that word about a project that big WILL get out no matter how remote it is or how much effort you put into secrecy. The vast expenditures of resources and capital to construct the Death Star didn't go unnoticed, how did someone fail a spot check so hard they missed someone remodeling planet with a gun barrel the size of the Death Star?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The Dilbert Principle is alive and well in the Galaxy Far Far Away... "The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place they can do the least damage: Management." Leadership seems to be pretty awful across the board after the fall of the First Galactic Empire. The Jedi Order's leader, Luke Skywalker, failed employee relations forever when he decided the best and most appropriate response to fears that a student would fall to the dark side was murder. The New Republic apparently had its head so far up its arse it seemingly paid no mind to the Galactic Empire 2.0 building a Super Death Star and an aircraft carrier big enough to carry battleships, to the extent that they never even saw the face of their enemy before being wiped out. The Resistance's leaders are, respectively, an aging diplomat who is running entirely on hope, an Admiral so uninspiring that she faces a (temporarily successful) mutiny before she's even been in command a day, and Leeroy Jenkins Jr. The First Order's Supreme Leader Snoke candidly admits the Dilbert Principle is in play when it comes to his most senior Army commander, his other senior commander is a dark jedi who has terrible impulse control issues and is prone to destroying equipment and assaulting his fellow employees, and Snoke himself is so bad at employee relations he's practically his own Starscream and so bad at reading his employees it literally is the death of him. One can only assume that all the competent soldiers have either retired or died out, and we're left with the galaxy's collection of Arnold J. Rimmers fighting the galaxy's David Listers. (We can only assume Cat's descendants currently run Naboo's fashion industry.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I've seen the new ones exactly twice... and TBH, for The Last Jedi that felt like one time too many. Hux really does look incredibly young, though. So much so that he's jokingly referred to as the Evil Weasley out here. Dunno... Snoke doesn't seem to be particularly good at it, especially with all that "admitting that I'm manipulating you" stuff he does in The Last Jedi. Everyone could see that lightsaber coming except him. Not super up on how bounty hunting works in Star Wars, but wouldn't the space boonies be the obvious first port of call for any bounty hunter looking for wanted fugitives? I have to admit that I wouldn't be remotely surprised if it was true... though I'd question whether it was truly racially motivated, or whether the racist remarks are just the internet trolls going for easy mode on upsetting their target. My parents are Trekkies, and I was raised on a steady diet of Star Trek's true-blue "diversity is good" ethos. I find myself inclined to suspect that the racism in the online harassment of Kelly Tran is the means, rather than the motivation, simply because the character of Rose Tico offers SO MUCH for a viewer to dislike that there's no need to grope around for flimsy reasons like the actress's race. It's not right or fair to transfer one's dislike of the character to the actor when that's largely the fault of the writers and editors, but some people have problems separating the character from the actor in practice. (The guy who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies gets this all the time from kids on the street, or so I've heard.) When I rewatched The Last Jedi a few days back, I was rather surprised at myself for how quickly Rose's voice became The Most Annoying Sound. Jar-Jar Binks might've been an obnoxious racist caricature, but his power to annoy pales in comparison to Rose Tico's... partly because nobody at LucasFilm was ever foolish enough to devote half a movie to a completely unnecessary subplot in which he was a central figure. It's bad enough that Rose is a central figure in an utterly pointless plot tumor, but she's also The Load. She doesn't really contribute anything to the proceedings of their mission except whining, massive levels of naivete, and a lot of terribly stilted, fake-sounding dialog like her attempt to sit in judgement of an entire resort city or that out-of-nowhere, faintly comical line about love. Even BB-8 makes more of a contribution. Rose's status as the blatantly unnecessary rival love interest for Finn is enough to make me think that it was racially-motivated casting. Not the representational diversity motive that some people have ascribed to it, but that the studio is backing down from a Finn x Rey pairing they'd spent so much time on in The Force Awakens because they're afraid of the potential backlash from having their main pairing be a white woman who chooses a black man over a white man1 so they've set Finn up with a partner they think will be less controversial for Western audiences. It's enough to make me consider Finn x Poe just to watch the bigots spontaneously combusting in the aisles. That's putting it mildly. Didn't he end up institutionalized a few years ago? 1. This is one of those awkward social dynamics about interracial relationships that I and some of my friends had an uncomfortable amount of personal experience with. Society in general seems to be a LOT more open and accepting of interracial relationships when the man's status in whatever the local social/racial hierarchy is is equal to or higher than the woman's.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Hadn't considered that... but then, I was looking at "Lux" in terms of the Latin word for "Light" and the SI unit for measuring illuminance. I have to admit, "Lacus" would probably make a lot more sense, considering most of what we see of the planet is its bodies of water. Can't have done. Macross 7 first mentions the planet [Lux/Rax/Lacus] in its 23rd episode "Sound Force", which aired 26 March 1995. The first episode of Lexx didn't air until over 2 years later, on 18 April 1997.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    "Lux" would be ルクス. On a lark, I did a search on the kana and got "Lacus", the Latin word for "lake".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Even the First Order's senior officers look awfully young. General Hux and Kylo Ren both look like they should be more concerned with the headmaster catching them out of their rooms after hours than with the business of running a militant fascist movement set to topple the government of the entire galaxy. Are we sure that's brainwashing and not just an unflattering and not entirely unmerited opinion of the people he grew up with after having fallen out with them? "Murderers" doesn't seem like much of a stretch considering that he left the Jedi Order after being the target of a (failed) premeditated murder plot on the part of his own uncle. It's not a stretch to assume the Resistance probably has factions like the Rebellion did (see Rogue One) that don't see tactics like assassination, anonymous bombings, and false flag operations as unacceptable. Being traitors is a "certain point of view" thing, since the New Republic is (or should that be "was"?) the end result of a paramilitary coup that deposed the previous "legitimate" galactic government that had been installed by the democratic process of the government before that (which both sides of that conflict recognized as legitimate). "Thieves" is questionable, but we do know the Rebellion's troops did steal supplies and ships when the opportunity arose and the Resistance doubtless does the same. The First Order's seemingly headquartered out in the space boonies... it seems unlikely that there'd be a mass migration of Imperial loyalists so mad at the Republic they'd form their own new galactic government with blackjack and hookers. Especially since, if what I'm reading is accurate, the New Republic branded anyone associated with the Empire a war criminal. I dunno... for all Sir Sabertantrum's newfound noise about letting go of the past, he doesn't seem to be capable of making his words and deeds line up. The first thing he does after taking over the First Order, apart from intimidating Hux into recognizing him as the new Supreme Leader, is pick up right where Snoke left off on the First Order's to-do list. He promptly pursues the remaining members of the Resistance to Crait, where he then positively jumps at the chance to pursue Snoke's #1 goal of wiping out the Jedi by killing Luke Skywalker. Looks to me like he's still out to finish what grandpappy started, just possibly for his own sake, not because "Darth Vader would've wanted it".
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The impression I got from Return of the Jedi and, more recently, Rogue One was that both of the Death Stars were top secret projects that the Empire did an amazingly good job of keeping under wraps until they were essentially complete. The Empire probably told the families of those who'd been killed in their destruction that their loved ones had died in the line of duty, but I doubt they would publicly admit the "insignificant" Rebellion blew up a clandestine, moon-sized, world-killing WMD with a crew of 1.2 million... let alone that it happened twice. (Especially considering that it must have been world-bankruptingly expensive to build even one of those things.) Do humans in the Galaxy Far Far Away live longer? It's what, like 30 years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, right? That'd put most of the immediate families of the Death Star's crew out of the military service age range, and wasn't the First Order mainly made up of kids who were abducted to become Stormtroopers? Hey, I'll take one thoughtful analysis of the narrative over a hundred videos of butthurt fanboys who are busily whinging themselves inside-out about how The Last Jedi kicked their dog or whatever.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks for sharing that. Easily the most intelligent thing I've seen on YouTube since someone filed a copyright claim against the uploads of Engineering an Empire. As prep for going to see Solo: a Star Wars Story, I rewatched Rogue One and The Last Jedi this past weekend, and this video spoke to one of my biggest issues with the new trilogy: that the First Order doesn't really have an established motive. The Force Awakens had me write it off as an artifact of a lazy attempt to do a by-the-numbers copy of A New Hope, but after watching this I'm left to wonder if they're not backhanding out some real world political allegory after all. I suppose it's all right there in the name, really. The First Order. The First Galactic Empire grew out of the Republic without overthrowing it, and here we have a group that's going well out of its way to "put on the reich" by aping the Empire's aesthetic in every conceivable way. The First Order doesn't have an ideology of its own because it doesn't need one... it's literally the dark version of the Rebel Alliance, a militarized resistance movement rising up to reinstate the previous deposed government. The First Order are nothing fancier than the Imperial version of Neo-Nazis. It still feels pretty lazy, but I guess it'd better than them being a complete cipher.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Vindirance and Black Rainbow are both anti-government paramilitary organizations that oppose the New UN Government's excessive interference in the domestic affairs of its member nations/planets and don't engage in illegal (read: "terrorist") military actions. They're both essentially anti-Latence organizations that Latence's information manipulation has branded as terrorist organizations. The key area of difference between the two organizations is, as I understand it, whether they work with the anti-Latence factions inside the New UN Forces or stand alone. Black Rainbow is a predominantly Zentradi anti-government organization that uses mainly Zentradi military hardware. It's led by former special forces top ace Timothy Daldhanton, hailed as the "All Kill Wizard", and largely operates without the support of anti-Latence forces within the NUNF. Vindirance is a predominantly human anti-government organization using mainly NUNF hardware obtained via back channels from emigrant planets. It's led by Mariafokina Barnrose, allegedly an alias of Therese Jenius, and it both collaborates with and operates with support from the various anti-Latence factions inside the New UN Forces and New UN Gov't.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's strongly implied that a number of fleets and planets did end up using the VF-24 either through purchase of an export variant or as a locally built monkey model specification, but because all the focus is on the derivative designs made based on the YF-24 Evolution specification they're never discussed in any depth. (Largely the same deal as the fleets that went to an all-Ghost air force in the previous fighter generation. We know it's a thing, but that it's a thing is about all we know.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It does strike me as a bit odd, or perhaps inconsistent, to start trying to make droids sympathetic now after six movies worth of C-3P0 being the designated buttmonkey. Maybe seven if we count that "red arm" moment in The Force Awakens. IIRC wasn't there a pre-Disney declaration from Lucas that droids aren't really "alive"? Like, they don't have a presence in the force and thus no soul? I suspect Bioware is ultimately to blame for that one. I'm familiar with it only through memes and so on posted on imgur, but wasn't there an almost Bender-esque droid from one of their RPGs that kind of started the whole "snarky" droid schtick? "If they liked it once, they'll love it twice". C-3P0 was given an ounce of personality because it made him more effective comic relief, being a prissy coward who the characters could abuse with impunity. It's hard to believe all of the smarm, pomposity, pessimism, and general cowardice would be useful for teaching etiquette and protocol, never mind serving as an interpreter. The only thing separating him from A.J. Rimmer is that he's actually useful for something. K-2SO's supposed to be a stolen Imperial security droid that was improperly memory-wiped and reprogrammed right? The snark is probably an artifact of that. Droids in general get a bit weird when they don't get regular memory wipes, so one that's running nonstandard software ought to develop all kinds of bizarre behaviors... like a peripheral running with default Windows drivers, it could behave in all sorts of unintended ways. Ultimately, it's probably just a botched attempt to appease the fans. I'm given to understand that Han winning the Millennium Falcon from Lando is one of the more frequent callbacks in any story involving Han and Lando from the old EU, so it must have seemed a very tempting target for the studio looking to develop a broader Star Wars film universe. Going forward kind of wasn't an option since Harrison Ford wanted out of Star Wars, and they'd already killed Han off entirely in The Force Awakens. The only way to tell his story would be to work backwards.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Haven't had a chance to see Solo myself yet... but I'm honestly surprised this question would even be asked. I've never been a big Star Wars fan myself, but even from my relatively minimal exposure to a pre-Disney Star Wars Expanded Universe I'd have been absolutely stunned if they hadn't tried to do at least one film about Han Solo's backstory. Leaving aside the EU, Han was the only member of the original Star Wars trilogy's power trio who'd had the opportunity to lead an interesting life before the events of A New Hope. Luke's uncle Owen kept him on the farm, well removed from anything approaching excitement or adventure, and Leia's foster family kept her pretty sheltered too. The impression I always had was that he was kind of a fan favorite, being the loveable scoundrel and all. I know the old EU had a bunch of stories where various parts of his shady past caught up to him, usually with lethal intent and all three movies in the original trilogy at least offered hints that Han had a complex and checkered past littered with unpleasant characters. After all, the man was a famous professional smuggler... which, as Game of Thrones would remind us, means you're kind of doing it wrong as a smuggler. (Then again, ending up in massive amounts of debt to a galactic crime lord is also "doing it wrong", right?) From that perspective, doing an action-centric origin story for one of the franchise's most beloved characters would seem to be an incredibly obvious slam-dunk decision. (Of course, die-hard fans in most any franchise are nearly impossible to please... so there's that.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "An interesting read" hardly begins to cover it. Definitely enjoyed the bits with the CG director talking about how certain shots were framed and what they were looking to emphasize. No big surprises in the technical information. I'd have to check publication dates but this might be the first explicit confirmation that the VF-22 didn't include the prototype's inertia vector control system. There's a little evidence of micro-evolution in the lore there too, WRT the YF-24 Evolution prototype. It changed from the VF-25 having the same basic performance as the YF-24 to, in the movie resources, the YF-24 being more on par with the YF-29. As an engineer, I'm definitely happy with the way the bit on Destroids and the Miyatake interview emphasizes the practicality of the common chassis. That's always been one of my favorite parts of Destroid design.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well that's a great big bucket of Nope. Didn't they learn anything from the problems Niantic had with Pokemon Go? Putting that onto a device with a quarter the battery life isn't exactly a winning solution. Have they actually confirmed that'll be a proper Pokemon game? The only listing I can find for it is just "Untitled Pokemon game" in the RPG genre... and that covers a multitude of sins like Mystery Dungeon. Whatever they do, I just hope it's a little more open world-y than Pokemon Sun and Moon and their v2.0's were... having control yanked away every fifty yards for another unskippable cutscene about the world's laziest rival or that walking edgelord meme was supremely frustrating.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    2018's shaping up to be kind of a Mega Man heavy year, then... since all ten Mega Man classic titles have been released on the Switch already under the Mega Man Legacy Collection banner, and eight of the Mega Man X games are coming out under that same banner in July. Kinda leaves me wishing we could get a port of Mega Man X: Command Mission to cap the whole affair.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The BattleTech/MechWarrior franchise has oscillated back and forth between trying to find ways to go about using the Unseen as-is and getting slapped for it, and trying to develop replacement designs based on them and getting slapped for that. Currently the pendulum has swung back to the derivative works slap phase. The guys "on deck" now may not have been around for the old drama, but that doesn't constitute a waiver of their legal obligation to apprise themselves of any relevant restrictions or applicable judgements on the property like court rulings and binding settlements from lawsuits or arbitration. The previous owners would've been legally obliged to inform them of the existence of any restrictions on the property resulting from court judgements, binding settlements, legislation, and so on. That they didnt pull a 180 and sue the previous owners for failing to disclose this after Harmony Gold slapped them with their first Cease and Desist is a strong indication that a disclosure WAS made but that they didn't follow up on it until Harmony Gold's C&D arrived. Realistically, legally, even the first offense doesn't merit the benefit of the doubt because they knew about the previous lawsuit and that the Unseen were Unseen for a legal reasons. The subsequent offenses just don't have any bloody excuse. They got slapped with their first C&D in ~June of 2009 over BattleTech: 25 Years of Art & Fiction and again barely two months later over the use of the Macross designs in MechWarrior 5. They seem to get sued for copyright infringement every 2-3 years! Jump to 2011 and it's Topps suing them for copyright infringement over a MechWarrior cartoon. At what point do we stop presuming they're just VERY stupid and go with the more logical assumption that someone who commits that much copyright infringement is probably NOT doing it accidentally. Oh, they were NOT sneaking... they were openly boasting about bringing back the Unseen even though their later apology for it did admit they KNEW that the designs were Unseen for legal reasons, they knew they didn't own them and weren't supposed to use them, but they thought they'd found a loophole. Eh... not quite. I'd like to say it's in the ballpark, and suffers from being oversimplified. FASA filed a lawsuit against Playmates alleging that ExoSquad was a ripoff of BattleTech. It was basically the same allegation that the creators of Babylon 5 leveled at Paramount over Star Trek: Deep Space Nine... that an agent acting on their behalf had pitched a concept that was rejected, and shortly thereafter a suspiciously similar product came out from that company. In this case, FASA's agent had pitched a BattleTech toy line to Playmates, who considered but ultimately rejected the pitch because their ExoSquad toy line had been in development for some time already and a licensee property wasn't attractive enough to make them abandon their original, fully-exploitable work. The kicker is that, not only did the courts rule in Playmates favor that ExoSquad was not a ripoff of FASA's BattleTech, it was FASA who got Harmony Gold involved in the first place by naming the ExoSquad Robotech toy line in the suit as examples of ExoSquad toy designs that allegedly infringed on FASA's copyrights (along with the Mad Cat). "Whoops" doesn't quite cover the magnitude of THAT cockup... not only did FASA wind up sued for copyright infringement and the usual array of "deceptive trade practices" that goes along with that charge, they also got sued for making false statements as to the origin of those designs. Nothing to support that contention appears in the legal briefs from the case. By all accounts, FASA was actively using those designs through their initial lawsuit with Playmates into their lawsuit with Harmony Gold. It is known that the two companies exchanged cease and desist notices between January 1985 and 1995 and that FASA did not reply to Harmony Gold's demands for disclosure of the source of their alleged license at any point... which practically screams "we knew this wasn't legal". Oh man, this isn't even the half of it. The court documents for this read like a bad farce, one of those terrible plays where the villain not only sets up his own defeat but practically commits suicide with minimal involvement from the hero. You can almost hear the judge's eyes rolling with every new motion for summary judgement against Playmates or motion for dismissal against Harmony Gold. If the proceedings had had background music, FASA's BGM would've been Weird Al's "Dare to be Stupid" or maybe Julius Fucik's "Entrance of the Gladiators"1. 1. The iconic band piece commonly associated with circus clowns.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Not exactly true... their legal departments are more famous for aggressively checking the work of others, but both are known to be fairly aggressive about checking themselves as well. For instance, Games Workshop did a major sweeping renaming of much of their miniatures lines starting in Age of Sigmar and rolling thru 40K and 30K after their legal counsel told them that trademarks on many of the names would be nigh-impossible to defend if challenged. Harmony Gold's legal counsel used to be a frequent source of complaint, as they took weeks to approve proposed news posts and vet future product content, to the extent that the marketing coordinator begged for permission to move news to Facebook to get around them (and was not shy about admitting it in public). (In fact, one of the anecdotes from Macek c.1995 about sequel development was how they had to frequently check themselves to avoid using IP they weren't allowed to and had to jump thru all manner of hoops for the proper approvals.) When it comes to working with someone else's intellectual property under license, you make damn sure you've dotted the i's and crossed the t's, because if you step over a line and piss off the company who holds your license, there goes your license and all your work was for nothing. That's true regardless of what industry you're in. It's really easy to turn a profit center into a massive loss if you do something to breach the terms of your license or you get caught using material you don't have rights to. The old ones, yes... though that was their licensees, mostly Antarctic Press, and that reportedly played a role in HG's decision to revoke their license. Games Workshop also likes to sue third party miniature makers if they use anything that smacks of a GW trademark. Not highly emotional, I just don't have a ton of patience for repeating myself. I'm sorry if I came off a bit terse. It's not a different kind of crime either, whether a crime was committed knowingly or unknowingly doesn't change the nature of the offense except in charges where motive is strictly relevant like murder vs. manslaughter or a fraud charge like uttering and publishing. Motive isn't necessary to establish that a count of copyright infringement has been committed.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    While taking a Lupin III angle on "Who is Boba Fett?" might make things more interesting, I'd say it's a safe bet they wouldn't go that route. Star Wars fans are really, stubbornly attached to canon and doubly so to any canon that predates Disney's reboot. They saw the backlash over The Last Jedi and it's a safe bet they'll be keen to avoid that. They've already tried once to deliberately create a new Boba Feet-style faceless ominous badass in Captain Phasma, and that just DID NOT WORK to the extent that it ended up being a source of funny moments more than anything (like Finn giving Phasma sh*t at blasterpoint in The Force Awakens). Boba Fett will, I suspect, always be the Boba Fett. I wouldn't put it past them for them to go the opposite route (ala L in Death Note) by having Boba Fett operating under aliases secretly being several of the galaxy's top bounty hunters to divert unwanted attention from himself. Seconded. The more Star Wars separates itself from legacy characters, the freer they are to mess with convention and really start exploring the possibilities of the setting. This was, IMO, the principal fault of the old Expanded Universe... the Skywalker-Solo clan and their circle of close friends from the original trilogy were at the center of absolutely every major galactic event for a century or more. The galaxy far far away is not such a small place that one family can constantly screw it up, like they're the Space Khardashians. Safer bets are few and far between. Well, he IS supposed to be the biggest badass bounty hunter there is... and while I don't follow Star Wars comics I recall from some postings on Imgur that in at least one of them Boba Fett was the guy who broke the news to Vader that the pilot who blew up the Death Star was named Skywalker.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There are some occasions where giving an offender the benefit of the doubt is merited... this is emphatically NOT one of them. What happened here was not an oversight that could occur within the bounds of what we might call "ordinary stupidity". To have entered into contract negotiations with another company to license a property which you have full foreknowledge they don't own AND are not affiliated with the owners of, without having seen documentation proving they have those rights and the authority to delegate them under license, is cocking up on a level that would be beneath even a first-year law student. This is literally like you buying a house without checking that the deed is in the seller's name. It's such a basic, fundamental thing that the idea that they failed to do so and carried on in blissful ignorance of the illegality of their actions for OVER A DECADE without once troubling to check that everything was above board even after getting sued by LucasFilm for trademark infringement, is so patently absurd it doesn't merit consideration. Much more believable is TCI's contention that FASA never properly communicated to them what its intentions for the art were. The only explanation that doesn't involve legendary levels of stupidity on FASA's part is that they knew. That they were aware TCI had no rights to Macross, Dougram, and Crusher Joe, and went forward with it anyway because they thought they would never get caught. Also, like I keep saying, stupidity is NOT a defense. If you were to buy a fraudulent deed to a house and start renting that house to whomever, when the owner catches you and presses charges, the claim that you didn't know the deed was fraudulent will not save you because it's your legal responsibility as a buyer to check this kind of thing. This is why FASA ended up settling out of court... it knew full bloody well stupidity was not a defense, and that if they didn't settle on HG's terms the judge would proceed to throw the book at them followed the library one brick at a time. Even if they really are so unthinkably stupid that they didn't check to ensure the license was valid, that doesn't exonerate them from having taken and used those designs illegally. There is no "not thieves" option here because there's no denying that they committed the crime... they are either thieves or very stupid thieves. Ah, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most game publishers who deal in licensed properties have a licensing manager whose job it is to keep this stuff straight and do the relevant diligence to ensure that everything is above board and all obligations are met. Having contract law and intellectual property law specialist attorneys on hand is also pretty much standard, with the larger publishers often having permanent stables of 'em on hand to pursue copyright and trademark infringement cases. (Games Workshop, for instance, is famous for the aggression and anal-retentiveness of its lawyers.) Even Harmony Gold, who we all know as the gold standard for incompetence, does at least this much.
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