Quote:
|
Although I still don't understand area with "TSL and AGDI", at least Activision is responding!
|
Activision did not actually revoke any licenses, the procedure that would have finalized TSL's fan license was simply never completed properly. In order to complete the licensing procedure, the team was expected to send a signed contract (a physical copy) from each individual member to Vivendi and only then would the fan license be official. But that never happened. The team did send virtual signatures over to VU, but that was insufficient, it seems.
The Activision/VU merger was apparantly somewhat chaotic and those digital signatures never even made the transfer, so when the TSL team approached Activision, not only did it turn out that their fan license was still work-in-progress, but since those digital signatures were lost and no physical contracts were sent, Activision didn't even know there was ever an agreement to begin with. Also, since it was now Activision who had to GRANT them a license (instead of merely acknowledging an existing one) the contract would have to be rewritten by their legal department since the old one still mentioned Vivendi. Activision didn't want to put any of their lawyers' man hours into redrafting the contract and gathering physical signatures, so instead they dropped the whole deal and sent a Cease & Desist instead.
When I asked the TSL team how on earth this could have happened, I was told that there had been many miscommunications on both sides.
So both sides share some responsibility for the second shutdown. Activision was being lazy and nasty, but Activision merged with Vivendi about 2.5 years after the initial C&D was revoked, so that fan license should have been finished up way before the merger, fine prints and all.
So the reason AGDI did not get into trouble was because we've been working with physical contracts from the start and we didn't run into said license troubles. Make no mistake, I think it's good the TSL team gets another chance to release their project, but that license deal was really a bit of a wallbanger for them.
