Mat Growcott writes: "The Internet is known for its more passionate, vocal users. Whether it’s trying to raise breast cancer awareness via Facebook or petitioning the world’s nations over important issues, people who would otherwise feel powerless can add just a little bit to a cause. They might do it to feel better about themselves, to fit in with their friends or maybe, just maybe, everybody genuinely likes to do a little bit of good in their lives. There’s another side to it though, when the passion, when the anger is misdirected and somebody ends up victimised; it happens all too often."
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Im not even surprised by this kind of court proceeding
from what I read (just snippets), I dont see grounds for this law suit.
there have been many other stories just as similar to each other and they never sue each other.
One of two things is going on here, Either
A: He is assuming that just by writing a book a person automatically acquires trademark rights to it. Which is incorrect.
Or
B: Some baboon at the trademark office really did grant it to him without doing adequate research into pre-existing trademarks, in which case as soon as his suit gets in front of a judge, his trademarks will be found null/void and tossed out the window.
Either way he has no claim.
Dune .1965: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
They Died Twice .1981: http://www.goodreads.com/bo...
Both of which used the same technological idea that Beiswenger is claiming rights to. His novel came out in 2003, 22 years after They died twice and 38 years after Dune.
A ripoff calling someone else a ripoff never turns out well.
He's suing because he believes, as somebody mentioned in a comment earlier, that Assassin's Creed II (and more recent examples, I believe) use things from the novel. For instance, the example he gave me was that the lab described in the book, released in 2003, is surprisingly similar to the lab presented in ACII.
EDIT: In fact, in the quote from the article in which John describes why it took so long for him to present his suit, he out and out says he thought any similarities apparent in the first game was down to one of the developers enjoying his novel. It was only with the second game that this became serious and he felt they were out and out copying him.
Is he changing his story now as damage control or did whoever wrote the original article screw up? If the original story was a screw up then its unfortunate he had to go through all the hate over it. But you can't really blame people for basing their response off the given information.
As far as I can tell, the original article was part screw-up, part the author sticking in opinions on something they didn't fully understand.
But who knows? I was interested in the case at the time, especially considering how angry people seemed to be getting about it, but I didn't really follow it all that closely.
It was only when the suit was dropped and I contacted John that I got to know things a little more in-depth, and certainly since then the story has been the same.