waiting for resolution RAZBAM Situation Post Archive (will be deleted)

[Horns]

2 hours ago, Citizen said:

The IP infringement claim.  At this point, they appear unwilling to back it up which lowers trust with the audience.  If I was in their shoes, I would be wishing I hadn't been explicit about IP violations since that sort of claim will be expected to be backed up.
 

RBs statement was fairly imprecise as to the root of the issue and rather focused on managing expectations moving forward.  If they weren't able to continue development for any reason, I would expect them to make a statement like that.

The major issue is that ED should have gotten in front of the situation long before RB could no longer sustain development.  We've lost phenomenal talent to a competitor and that is a failure of stewardship that is difficult to overlook.

Ok, so you feel that companies should be transparent about business disputes, I sort of understand that. You do acknowledge that’s not common practice though, yeah? Your standards for deciding how you regard businesses are far you alone to set, and it’s a good thing to contribute them to the conversation, I’m just pointing out that not a lot of businesses would meet that.

[JuiceIsLoose]

8 hours ago, NineLine said:

We simply cannot share any more than we have, we know it makes it tough but that is where we are at right now. When things dip into the legal realm, you do not try and use social media to win your case. It's really that simple. 

No, I do not agree, they are handling this as professionally and correctly as possible now that this is a legal matter. The court of public opinion will not solve anything, in fact it might make it worse in some cases, we choose to move forward as we have and hope for the best outcome possible.

Because you have stated many times that people are spewing half truths and conspiracy theories here, let’s be clear here. ED CAN choose to say more. They are CHOOSING to not say anything, as you say, to win the case.

Hope the court outcome ED is looking for far outweighs the damage done to your own public opinion. No one has seen any evidence of how this claimed IP infringement has damaged DCS. The only thing I see damaging DCS is their own CHOICE to not pay third party developers (and we both know this isn’t the first time) and now it’s finally become public. 

Edited August 6, 2024 by JuiceIsLoose

[freehand]

It would be very unprofessional to say more it's not a social media debate.  

ED are doing the right thing, as for public damage that depends on the outcome at the moment all is just he said she said. 

[JuiceIsLoose]

6 minutes ago, freehand said:

ED are doing the right thing....

That depends on whether their IP claim has any validity....

[freehand]

1 minute ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

That depends on whether their IP claim has any validity....

So you know something no one else does ? do you have inside information. 

[JuiceIsLoose]

22 minutes ago, freehand said:

So you know something no one else does ? do you have inside information. 

There is lots of stuff out there in other discord and subreddits. Won't go into much more because the CM's don't like it. I can DM you if you would like.

Also I could ask you the same question. There is nothing supporting their claim of IP infringement, unless you know something else no one else does? Do you have inside information?

[Q3ark]

This situation is utterly ridiculous. If the ED and Razbam management teams had done their job properly in the first place this would never have escalated to the level of lunacy that we see now. 
 

I’ve seen all the rumours on here and the ones “that Reddit page”, I expect the truth lies somewhere in the middle, personally I don’t care. ED are completely at fault here as the platform holder, get it sorted out if you want any more money from me. 

[Guest]

41 minutes ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

Also I could ask you the same question. There is nothing supporting their claim of IP infringement, unless you know something else no one else does? Do you have inside information?

Well that’s not exactly true. Nick Grey, officially and on behalf of ED, has publicly asserted IP infringement.  No one from Razbam, officially and on behalf of Razbam, has publicly disputed that claim.  We know that frivolous claims of IP infringement expose the party making the statements to defamation liability.  We know that lawyers are involved in the dispute and are advising both sides. And we know that ED has not taken any steps to withdraw the claim of IP infringement (which I’m certain any reasonable lawyer would advise them to do if the claim was truly baseless).

Taken together, that seems like pretty reasonable evidence that at least a potential/nonfrivolous IP infringement claim exists. Whether the claim is valid is not something we can assess based on the information we have. 

Edited August 6, 2024 by wombat778

[JuiceIsLoose]

Just now, wombat778 said:

Well that’s not exactly true. Nick Gray, officially and on behalf of ED, has asserted IP infringement.  No one from Razbam, officially and on behalf of Razbam, has disputed that claim.  We know that frivolous claims of IP infringement expose the party making the statements to defamation liability.  We know that lawyers are involved in the dispute and are advising both sides. And we know that ED has not taken any steps to withdraw the claim of IP infringement (which I’m certain any reasonable lawyer would advise them to do if the claim was truly baseless).
 

Taken together, that seems like pretty reasonable evidence that at least a potential IP infringement claim exists. Whether the claim is valid is not something we can assess based on the information we have. 

What we don't have is an official announcement that ED is making legal claims of IP infringement. What we do have is an official announcement from ED claiming that RB violated IP and that they "are seeking a reasonable and forward-looking commercial outcome rather than entertaining legal claims". If you are only going by official announcements, there is nothing in ED's official announcement stating they are taking legal action against RB for IP infringement. If you are so set on only using official announcements, please show me where ED has stated they are making a legal claim of IP infringement. So how do we even know ED is pursuing legal claims specifically for IP infringement. Also, you are stating that a reasonable lawyer would advise them to withdraw their claim if it was baseless. But there are plenty of frivolous lawsuits that happen, how do we know this isn't one of them? 

[freehand]

45 minutes ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

There is lots of stuff out there in other discord and subreddits. Won't go into much more because the CM's don't like it. I can DM you if you would like.

Also I could ask you the same question. There is nothing supporting their claim of IP infringement, unless you know something else no one else does? Do you have inside information?

Seriously ? try to post like an adult would go a long way & stop wasting peoples time  with such a comment.

[JuiceIsLoose]

1 minute ago, freehand said:

Seriously ? try to post like an adult would go a long way & stop wasting peoples time  with such a comment.

You ask me to provide additional information to support what I am saying. I say that I can. Then I simply ask you for the same, and that makes me childish?

[freehand]

2 minutes ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

You ask me to provide additional information to support what I am saying. I say that I can. Then I simply ask you for the same, and that makes me childish?

I have no source as you do not so irrelevant childish nonsense it has been said all before.

[BIGNEWY]

@JuiceIsLoose and @freehand please just stop 

It is pointless to argue if you are not the first party in this dispute. 

If you are getting your info second hand or from trolls on reddit it isnt helpful to anyone. 

No matter what we all have to wait for the dispute to be resolved. 

thank you 

[Guest]

23 minutes ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

What we don't have is an official announcement that ED is making legal claims of IP infringement. What we do have is an official announcement from ED claiming that RB violated IP and that they "are seeking a reasonable and forward-looking commercial outcome rather than entertaining legal claims". If you are only going by official announcements, there is nothing in ED's official announcement stating they are taking legal action against RB for IP infringement. If you are so set on only using official announcements, please show me where ED has stated they are making a legal claim of IP infringement. So how do we even know ED is pursuing legal claims specifically for IP infringement. Also, you are stating that a reasonable lawyer would advise them to withdraw their claim if it was baseless. But there are plenty of frivolous lawsuits that happen, how do we know this isn't one of them? 

That's not the way this works. In virtually every IP dispute, the dispute starts with one party making a claim of infringement, generally through a cease and desist letter or other written notice.  The parties then negotiate. Taking "legal action" -- ie, filing a complaint in a court, is usually a very last resort and is often done only after months or years of negotiations after the negotiations have broken down.  The old saying is that no wins in litigation other than the lawyers. Of the hundreds of IP disputes I've been involved in, I could probably count the ones that went to formal "legal action" on one hand.

The reason why a reasonable lawyer would advise removing a defamatory statement is that it limits the ongoing damage caused by the defamation.  While removing it does not eliminate the prior defamation damages it can at least limit them going forward.

Yes, there are occasionally truly frivolous lawsuits filed.  In my experience, they tend to be very rare in contracts/IP disputes (as opposed to, for example, personal injury torts cases). While of course its _possible_ that this is one of those rare cases, per Occam's razor I'm not going to jump to that explanation without some actual reason to believe it is true.

Edited August 6, 2024 by wombat778

[NineLine]

1 hour ago, JuiceIsLoose said:

There is lots of stuff out there in other discord and subreddits. Won't go into much more because the CM's don't like it. I can DM you if you would like.

Also I could ask you the same question. There is nothing supporting their claim of IP infringement, unless you know something else no one else does? Do you have inside information?

Once again you are falling into the same trap, we are not going to go into details because it's a legal manner, some people are jumping on that and saying it's not valid. You can choose to believe that, but please do not come here and try and champion for people to sway one way or the other. The announcements are as deep as we can go now based on the nuances of how legal disagreements are handled. Just because we can't or won't talk about it doesn't mean there is not more to it. 

[Citizen]

31 minutes ago, wombat778 said:

The reason why a reasonable lawyer would advise removing a defamatory statement is that it limits the ongoing damage caused by the defamation.  While removing it does not eliminate the prior defamation damages it can at least limit them going forward.

In this hypothetical case, ED would need to balance the harm from limiting further damages versus the public opinion reality that walking those statements back will be perceived as being an admission that there was no IP violation.

Compounded with the difficulty that pursing formal legal action against a P.O. box in Switzerland represents, I suspect we're seeing a decision made from a lesser of two evils standpoint.

Problem:  Without evidence, the wider audience will eventually reject the claim.  I believe this is where we are at now.

[NineLine]

1 minute ago, Citizen said:

Problem:  Without evidence, the wider audience will eventually reject the claim.  I believe this is where we are at now.

The legal dispute is between ED and RAZBAM, the court is not the court of public opinion or I should say, the court of public opinion will not solve this. We understand that we are not taking part in the public back and forth and we know what it looks like to some, but it's not professional or helpful to the legal process and in fact, as you stated, it would just sow more angst and anger than there already is. We stand behind everything we have said already, but will not be saying anything else until there is some form of resolution, one way or the other. 

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Citizen said:

In this hypothetical case, ED would need to balance the harm from limiting further damages versus the public opinion reality that walking those statements back will be perceived as being an admission that there was no IP violation.

Compounded with the difficulty that pursing formal legal action against a P.O. box in Switzerland represents, I suspect we're seeing a decision made from a lesser of two evils standpoint.

Problem:  Without evidence, the wider audience will eventually reject the claim.  I believe this is where we are at now.

Let's be real, there will never be a public announcement of evidence supporting the IP infringement claim. No business would do such a thing, and it's absurd to base an assessment of whether the claim has merit on publicly released evidence (or lack thereof).  There are really two eventual outcomes here: (i) we see a statement jointly made by ED/Razbam stating that the parties have resolved their differences or (ii) one side or the other will file a lawsuit.  If there is a settlement agreement, it will be confidential and we will never see what it contains. It almost certainly will also contain non-disparagement provisions prohibiting both sides from badmouthing the other.

Regarding walking the statements back -- sure, it's possible the IP claim all some complicated scheme and 4D chess being played by ED.  But we have no reason to believe that it is -- any more than we have reason to believe any other random theory.   More importantly, if the claim truly is frivolous, I would absolutely expect Razbam to have put out a formal official statement by an authorized representative firmly rejecting the claims and stating that they are defamatory.  I haven't seen anything like that, suggesting that it's at the very least a potentially viable (ie a "straight face") claim. Again, referring to Occam's razor, the simplest explanation for what we have publicly observed from both parties is that 1) there is some IP dispute between the parties that is not completely fabricated, but is also not a slam dunk for either side (the VAST majority of IP disputes fall into this category) and 2) the parties are engaging in the normal negotiation process to resolve it.

Edited August 6, 2024 by wombat778

[Citizen]

9 minutes ago, NineLine said:

The legal dispute is between ED and RAZBAM, the court is not the court of public opinion or I should say, the court of public opinion will not solve this. We understand that we are not taking part in the public back and forth and we know what it looks like to some, but it's not professional or helpful to the legal process and in fact, as you stated, it would just sow more angst and anger than there already is. We stand behind everything we have said already, but will not be saying anything else until there is some form of resolution, one way or the other. 

There are at least two battles:
-A legal dispute between ED and RB,
-ED maintaining the trust of the community.

The court of public opinion will not solve the former, but it's key to the latter.  I don't have access to all the metrics but based on what I have seen, ED has been unsuccessful in maintaining public trust.  The tipping point was the conflict hitting the mindshare of DCS users that don't spend time on the forums or discord.

Most DCS users are part of small groups where one or two members are the highly-connected 'cheerleaders.'  Those in the orbit of these cheerleaders tend to adopt the beliefs, preferences, and purchasing habits of the cheerleaders.  Historically, to move the perception of the larger audience, ED could influence the cheerleaders and the majority of the userbase would follow.
This conflict is different.  Whereas previously these groups could be influenced by influencing the cheerleaders, now the interests are different enough that differences are emerging in the subgroups.  I suspect that this has had a deleterious effect on play time (particularly SP play time) and that will likely manifest as lower overall product excitement.  If that influences production velocity downwards, you potentially have a dangerous spiral.

For my part, I can't get around ED not getting ahead of this before the DCS community lost some incredible talent to a competitor.  If RB hasn't been paid for some time, and ED says that is due to an IP dispute, then the IP dispute has been known for some time and preparations to prevent loss of talent should have been made long ago.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Citizen said:

The court of public opinion will not solve the former, but it's key to the latter.  I don't have access to all the metrics but based on what I have seen, ED has been unsuccessful in maintaining public trust.  The tipping point was the conflict hitting the mindshare of DCS users that don't spend time on the forums or discord.

I agree complete that the whole issue has been handled badly by both sides.  Companies constantly have disputes with other companies.  I guarantee that your car manufacturer, your ISP, your insurance company, and every other major business you deal with is involved in a ton of disputes with its vendors and contractors.  But we don't care because we don't hear about it.  This should have been handled without it becoming public.

That said, I don't necessarily agree on the impact.  While I am unburdened by facts, my best guess is that the vast majority of DCS users don't give a rats ass about this dispute.  Most likely don't check forums or discord regularly, and so probably don't even know about the dispute let alone knowing enough to have picked sides. Normal people tend to have a lot of real-world problems like food, rent, job security, inflation, etc that get a lot more mindshare than first world problems like a slap fight between game developers.  IMHO of course 

[NineLine]

9 minutes ago, Citizen said:

There are at least two battles:
-A legal dispute between ED and RB,
-ED maintaining the trust of the community.

The first one has to be solved before the second one can be worked on.

DCS and ED are healthy right now, and sure this has impacted things and it will need a lot of work once it's solved to move forward, but all our other 3rd Parties and ED are doing well. I don't think anything we do right now in a public sense would be healthy for anyone. Silence is currently the best bet for right now, and later down the road depending on how it all shakes out we can see what we need to do then. But we don't need to "influence cheerleaders", to me that is a bad look. 

[Citizen]

5 minutes ago, wombat778 said:

That said, I don't necessarily agree on the impact.  While I am unburdened by facts, my best guess is that the vast majority of DCS users don't give a rats ass about this dispute.  Most likely don't check forums or discord regularly, and so probably don't even know about the dispute let alone knowing enough to have picked sides. Normal people tend to have a lot of real-world problems like food, rent, job security, inflation, etc that get a lot more mindshare than first world problems like a slap fight between game developers.  IMHO of course 

You're correct!  Mostly.  The average user by default doesn't give a damn if RB or ED is in the right.  What they want is for the product they paid for to work for the short period of times they have available to play, and they want to be sure that development will continue.  Their investment in the slap fight changes radically when Mx. Average User logs on and finds radars not working, flight models depreciating, and hears of public announcements that their products won't be supported moving forward.  Sure, ED can try to communicate that things will be fixed, but the negative perception of their extremely limited free time being destroyed by a dysfunction that could have been avoided will be extremely difficult to shake, especially since it's very difficult to communicate directly to those users.

 

15 minutes ago, NineLine said:

But we don't need to "influence cheerleaders", to me that is a bad look. 

I understand that point of view, but please understand that the ED discord and this forum are effectively tools to influence the cheerleaders.  The average user does not interact with these channels.  From that point of view, ED has been influencing cheerleaders for quite some time.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Citizen said:

Their investment in the slap fight changes radically when Mx. Average User logs on and finds radars not working, flight models depreciating, and hears of public announcements that their products won't be supported moving forward.

Maybe, but it's not like DCS has been the poster child of stability and reliability through its history.  I have been using it since 2008, and I often come and go for months or years at a time.  Whenever I come back after a while away, there is a pretty good chance that something major will be broken in any given module.  Sometimes a given DCS build is a stuttery mess. I just move on to something else and try again in a few months.  In the grand scheme of things, the radar being broken for a couple weeks isn't THAT big a deal...

EDIT: also, not sure why I would second guess ED's strategy on this given that they have more information on usage and user engagement, as well as more skin in the game, than anyone else

Edited August 6, 2024 by wombat778

[Citizen]

8 minutes ago, wombat778 said:

Maybe, but it's not like DCS has been the poster child of stability and reliability through its history.  I have been using it since 2008, and I often come and go for months or years at a time.  Whenever I come back after a while away, there is a pretty good chance that something major will be broken in any given module.  Sometimes a given DCS build is a stuttery mess. I just move on to something else and try again in a few months.  In the grand scheme of things, the radar being broken for a couple weeks isn't THAT big a deal...

Yeah, that's been a challenge for sure.  There's a fundamental difference between something breaking due to development process and something breaking due to an entire 3rd party dev stating that development is stopped due to a disagreement.  One is expected (at least by those that stick around) and the other is interpreted as something that was preventable.
From what I'm seeing, the Venn diagram of people willing to give DCS a pass for development instability and people willing to give ED a pass for hosting a disruptive dispute is definitely not a circle.  I cannot stress this strongly enough: this disruption is unlike any DCS has seen yet in terms of public perception.

There is a version of this where the dispute concludes in a messy way and ED/DCS continues on, but the impact to growth (or the limiting of contraction as the case may be) will be felt.  Worse if a competitor rears their head while RB modules aren't demonstrably supported.

[NineLine]

28 minutes ago, Citizen said:

You're correct!  Mostly.  The average user by default doesn't give a damn if RB or ED is in the right.  What they want is for the product they paid for to work for the short period of times they have available to play, and they want to be sure that development will continue.  Their investment in the slap fight changes radically when Mx. Average User logs on and finds radars not working, flight models depreciating, and hears of public announcements that their products won't be supported moving forward.  Sure, ED can try to communicate that things will be fixed, but the negative perception of their extremely limited free time being destroyed by a dysfunction that could have been avoided will be extremely difficult to shake, especially since it's very difficult to communicate directly to those users.

 

I understand that point of view, but please understand that the ED discord and this forum are effectively tools to influence the cheerleaders.  The average user does not interact with these channels.  From that point of view, ED has been influencing cheerleaders for quite some time.

Yes, we want people to like DCS and indirectly ED and it's 3rd Parties. So we do what we can to influence people to enjoy DCS and get into the sim. What we don't want to do is to influence anyone to take our side over anyone else, because at some point we will have to try to go back to normal, and trashing or making people pick our side is not going to make getting back to normal an easy thing. Enough damage has already been done, we don't need to add to it to start a he said/he said social media battle.