Hexa
Member
This is a fantastic post. I'm going to expand on it a bit, primarily related to the spoiled portions, so I'm just spoiler tagging everything.
The reason its important to enforce having some sort of trademark message in new works when something is licensed is that it provides an easy defense against naked licencing accusations. Naked licencing essentially means allowing a licencor to use a mark in a new work without exercising any control over said work, and can result in a loss of the mark. This happening is pretty rare, but major corporations aren't known to take chances, and just having a requirement to throw in a "______ is a trademark of _____" when licencing is really simple, so in general it pretty much always a guarantee. Hence, for it to not be there in UC4 with Activision still holding rights would be incredibly bizarre if this is from a third party deal.
Second, what constitutes a new work. Ultimately licencing agreements aren't set in stone and offer an incredible amount of flexibility. We may never know what exactly the full rights are of what Sony owns with the first three Crash games, but based on their comments earlier we can guess that it's pretty limited when it comes to new works. Would Crash in UC4 count as a new work. It's significantly different from the PS1 version in terms of code and even somewhat in terms of content. Could they argue in court that it's the same work? They could... and I guess I can see somewhat of an argument, though I personally think they'd lose. But at the end of the day, none of that matters because as I said, big corporations don't take risks with this stuff when it comes to other big corporations. They always work out some sort of deal beforehand, and said deal should involve crediting Activision.
Lastly, while TESS is updated daily on weekdays, who ultimately own a trademark in the USPTO database at some specified time doesn't necessarily mean that the mark still belongs to them as they just need to file the paperwork within a reasonable time frame. However, Boyes said it still belongs to Activision. But the thing with UC4 is already there. So that would mean that there would have to be some sort of agreement involving licencing leading up to a transfer, but that's also something really strange and something I've never seen before. Plus, it's something they really didn't have to do, as pretty much the only benefit of such a deal would be that Boyes could claim "Activision still owns Crash", which really isn't necessary. Another alternative is that they set the date of transfer to the UC4 release date, but that's been delayed a good amount and agreements such as these are usually more set in stone before hand.
So ultimately, there is definitely something fucky going on with the Crash IP. It could just be a long series of coincidences teasing wise followed by Naughty Dog making a pretty dumb blunder in terms of accreditation for a deal that was supposedly hard to obtain a year before hand, but personally I believe pretty strongly that Crash is coming back.
Second, what constitutes a new work. Ultimately licencing agreements aren't set in stone and offer an incredible amount of flexibility. We may never know what exactly the full rights are of what Sony owns with the first three Crash games, but based on their comments earlier we can guess that it's pretty limited when it comes to new works. Would Crash in UC4 count as a new work. It's significantly different from the PS1 version in terms of code and even somewhat in terms of content. Could they argue in court that it's the same work? They could... and I guess I can see somewhat of an argument, though I personally think they'd lose. But at the end of the day, none of that matters because as I said, big corporations don't take risks with this stuff when it comes to other big corporations. They always work out some sort of deal beforehand, and said deal should involve crediting Activision.
Lastly, while TESS is updated daily on weekdays, who ultimately own a trademark in the USPTO database at some specified time doesn't necessarily mean that the mark still belongs to them as they just need to file the paperwork within a reasonable time frame. However, Boyes said it still belongs to Activision. But the thing with UC4 is already there. So that would mean that there would have to be some sort of agreement involving licencing leading up to a transfer, but that's also something really strange and something I've never seen before. Plus, it's something they really didn't have to do, as pretty much the only benefit of such a deal would be that Boyes could claim "Activision still owns Crash", which really isn't necessary. Another alternative is that they set the date of transfer to the UC4 release date, but that's been delayed a good amount and agreements such as these are usually more set in stone before hand.
So ultimately, there is definitely something fucky going on with the Crash IP. It could just be a long series of coincidences teasing wise followed by Naughty Dog making a pretty dumb blunder in terms of accreditation for a deal that was supposedly hard to obtain a year before hand, but personally I believe pretty strongly that Crash is coming back.
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