Suing Is Magic

A year ago (modulo some months) I made a particularly flippant comment about how, given it's slavish devotion to a specific brand of quirky humor and subversiveness; UNDERTALE could just have easily been passed off as a fan-made sequel to the MOTHER series it so heavily cribs from. In video games, we use the term "spiritual successor" to indicate this sort of thing. Part of my reasoning is based on the fact that the MOTHER series itself doesn't have a particular shared thread of character or setting.

Whenever a fan project is shut down by the company that actually owns the work, a lot of stupid misconceptions seem to start to float around regarding "intellectual property" law. I typically avoid this word if at all possible because it's a confusing term which tries to lump several laws together. The problem with confusing several laws together is that it results in stupid statements like "They have to protect their IP or they'll lose it, that's why they just took down 200 fan projects". Ignore the fact that out of the four things most commonly cited as "intellectual property", only trademarks and trade secrets (not relevant to 99% of fan project litigation) can be lost through inaction.