Pertaining to the copyright question

[Maouse]

Two problems maybe (maybe only one?)

1. When did AH go out of business?  If they were defunkt before the sale
presented in this article, who had rights to their intellectual property?

2. Although this is a nice "newspaper" article, and it does go to the
length of stating that they bought ONE FRPG, it does not state the one we
are wondering about.  100-200 is kinda vauge for my tastes.  Also, I would
note that despite the "takeover" no intellectual property rights appear to
have been exchanged (per Copyright office anyway).  Monarch Avalon is still
a subsiduary of Hasbro with it's own set of rights... although I'd guess
Hasbro could get them to allow the reproduction of their property.

Add to this the fact that Hasbro denies having bought the Powers & Perils
title and what are we left with?

If AH (itself, not it's parent co.) went defunkt before transfering legal
rights to this game to it's parent company (which may well have never taken
place), and/or the parent company did not file for an extension or transfer
of rights (from what I've read they had to do it within 1 year (ie. 1999))
then they are no longer entitled to Copyright protections.

It was apparent from the letter from Hasbro they did not get the copyrights
to this title.  I guess the last thing to do would be to write Monarch
Avalon (if they still exist).

I have to wonder if this is a necessary step, however, as I could find no
record of title changes between AH and MA, meaning that the titles Hasbro
got were titles MA owned and AH may have helped produce, but the title in
question may have been entirely AH's intellectual property and never
(apparently from records I found and posted) transfered to anyone.

In a nutshell, the parent company does not necessarily OWN the copyright of
its subsiduary.  The subsiduary can then be sold with rights intact rather
than having to take rights from the parent company.  I believe this is the
way business is usually conducted.

In this case the subsiduary went defunkt and all of it's intellectual
property is probably public domain.  The parent company, which had holdings
of the games listed in the article, was bought and became a subsiduary of
another company.  Now it still owns it's copyrights, but is allowing the
parent company to publish it's material.  But since the sub-subsiduary
company no longer exists, and it's property was not transfered(as far as I
can find out from the copyright office) within 1 year (to someone with
valid claim... which MA was not even in this particular case; per original
copyright listing only AH had the legal right to do this) it is now public
domain (probably if legality follows logic, which sometimes it does).

any copyright lawyer chat rooms out there? sheesh...

-Marcel aka maouse