Atari slap Llamasoft with a cease and desist over TxK

[Nebagram]

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/atari-blocks-jeff-minter-from-releasing-new-versions-of-txk/0146828

Jeff, as you'd imagine, is going ballistic (https://twitter.com/llamasoft_ox) about this.

[retroguy]

All the more reason for copyright to be abolished in its entirety. It stopped being about "protecting artists rights" a long time ago. If it were about unfair competition, that would be one thing, but so often the only instance in which we see copyright law applied to any medium is to shut down independent projects that could never in a hundred years compete with the big boys and in most cases aren't even trying to. It has to stop.

[Tupin]

I do like how Minter puts "Atari" in air quotes. I've never thought of them as legitimate successors either.

[Greg2600]

The Atari brand is now owned by some greedy French loser who has no real world knowledge of video games.

[Tanooki]

I'm familiar with the fucking scumbag CEO of Atari and this is just one of his many conquests or attempted conquests into trolling and far more. A certain Atari owned IP should be making a come back this year and he multiple times decided to attack the development of it attempting to extort more control and money from a deal which took some much larger and scarier lawyers and personal owners with deeper pockets and short fuses for bullshit to scare the guy into submission. Another attempt was to make contractual deals which were drafted up, and before they could be signed last year changing the terms multiple times, each successive time throwing more cash demands and less product each time unless more cash was involved too and that deal on the licensing side of old software was pitched into the grave. The dude is a child with deep pockets, not too many functional brain cells, a greed streak a mile long, and had control issues and won't even trust his own staff to work things out. I can't say which games, which companies and licensing deals, but needless to say if the company as it is ever goes public to the point that asshole could be voted out and fired, I hope they do it as he alone is keeping lots of great games or rebirths of games off the market for greedy deceptive purposes of his own making.

I've heard a few other stories, don't remember the details enough to even be vague like I am in this post but there's a history there and I really feel for Minter as he's an all around nice guy from everything I've ever interacted with and really didn't deserve that treatment. The fact the trolling frog is breaking the claims up in legal documents one at a time so they'd have to be addressed in court individually on different cases fits the bill. He knows his ego tripping bullshit has weak legs to legally stand on so he'll just use court system delays and lawyer fees to bankrupt Minter if he chose to stand up for himself.