Scènes à faire

Yesterday, January 2nd 2019, a joint letter was sent to the judge. The defendants are trying to dismiss the case. First they were defending themselves by saying that I'm trying to own copyrights to the real life microscopic tardigrade. I have never claimed by any mean that I owned the rights to the real life microscopic tardigrade. Now they are saying I cannot copyright "enlarged Tardigrades in space". The creatures in the game are huge Tardigrades, blue lit and being the research subject by a blonde botanist of which later will be used to facilitate instantaneous space travel. I've been posting development updates on my blog, Steam, AGS forums, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube... since May 2014 and I have always engaged with comments and discussions with fans and friends.

The defendants are trying to emphasize on the few elements from their show that were not taken from my work. We dug up an old case which has an interesting line: "No plagiarist can excuse his wrong by showing how much work he did not pirate." Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49, 56. The defendants are also trying to say that my original ideas would qualify as Scènes à faire, like when a sci fi story includes a starship, a space captain, an engineer, a science officer and an alien.  However, the expression of these characters as in facial features like pointy ears or ridged forehead are protected, Mattel, Inc. v. Goldberger Doll Mfg. Co., 365 F.3d 133 (2d Cir. 2004).

So according to the defendants, a blonde botanist doing a research on giant blue tardigrades to be used in space travel should be a common trait in science fiction movies just like "fast draw" scenes and bar fights in western movies.

The distribution of my project before September 2017 is quite excellent too. Before September 2017, my YouTube channel had a total of 3.2M views, the Tardigrades game-in-production thread on the AGS forums had 200K views and 500 comments replies making it the top adventure game-in-production of all time. My blog here had 100K views. Tardigrades was also Greenlit on Steam. For those of you who don't know what Steam is, Steam is the biggest gaming platform on the net. Game developers post demos, alphas, even concepts to the Steam Greenlight website, people start voting by answering this question: "Would you buy this game from Steam?" After getting enough votes, the game gets Greenlit, which means when its development is complete, Steam does some arrangements to host and sell the game on their massive platform. Note that there are several old Star Trek games on Steam even prior to 2014. Funny thing is, they might have even voted for Tardigrades.