Hi all!
As we said in the description of the game, one of the hardships in development was copyright troll(s) suing Iron Sky Universe, the owner of the Iron Sky intellectual property. Yesterday the court gave it’s decision and Iron Sky Universe won.
The whole history is long and winding, but especially now that the court has made it’s decision it’s safe to say their claim to copyright amounted to trolling, as they were found to have no copyright to the film or it’s elements.
You can read more about the case in this article by The Hollywood Reporter.
The court’s decision was expected, but how this affected us is that the troll(s) have a long history of harassing anyone who did anything Iron Sky related - even non-commercial game mods - with legal threats, fake DMCA takedown requests etc. That’s a headache we really didn’t want to deal with during a hectic 2 week game jam. In the end that meant that not only did we need their permission, we had to have carefully drafted contracts with ISU specifically for this so we would have something to smack down false claims with. The Lunar Adventure Team is grateful to Iron Sky Universe for taking the time to give us permission to do this game even int he middle of the lawsuit.
Hopefully this will be the last anyone has to hear of the trolls and we can concentrate on doing what we love - making games. The first thing is fixing the last issues with A Lunar Adventure. If wishes were horses, the dialog-visibility bugs would be trivial to fix, yet sadly bugs are still outrunning horses for the moment. We’ll keep polishing the game and squishing bugs in the engine at the same time.
You see, we have some bigger plans. We have had a larger Iron Sky adventure game in the planning stages for a long time now. Now we’re eager to get started on actually making it!
To wrap it up: we are over the Moon, so to say, about the ruling!
