I am not much familiar with US law, but I would not deny the possibility of negative financial outcome for Warzone.com LLP, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/movies/clint-eastwood-wins-cbd-lawsuit.html

However even in such scenario, if Warzone fails to pay what's awarder by court, the game should not end but rather be sold to another owner, who most likely will continue or even hire Fizzer to develop. Or maybe some IPO or just new share emission. I think there can be max 200 shareholders, but not sure.

I didn't know about the inside joke so indeed, I'm happy to have misunderstood this line.

Ok, Fizzer may be playing some kind of real life poker, or even Warzone :D, with Activision, for real money, and since he may not need money, possibly for fun. Well, the good news is Fizzer is one of the best strategic player at WZ, and an incredibly clever person. I would also bet he is a terrific poker player for some (or same) reasons.
And giants not always win against smaller guys they are trying to rip off (the example I have in mind is the twins vs Zukerberg who apparently inspired from their idea for FB).
Ofc, only future will tell.

In this link (originally posted by Norman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark, it does say "the owner of a trademark registered by the USPTO can enforce the trademark in all U.S. states, sue for damages (including lost profits), and significantly, recover attorneys' fees and costs incurred in protecting the trademark against infringement"
So technically Fizzer may have to refund Activision lawyers in case of a loss in this civil "war". I'm not sure how much we are talking, and I definitely can't be sure whether Fizzer could afford such liability. Even with the help of yet another crowdfunding ;-) (may crowdfunding somehow be part of business models btw ? True question).

The same article also says "a common law [unregistered] trademark owner's remedies [to defend himself] may be limited to injunctive relief (a court order for the defendant to cease and desist the infringement)"
That would justify the need to send such letter to Activision. This is defense basics in said situation. Not sure why Fizzer would hide this letter though, or was he just not aware of his lawyers doings ? And why not, I mean, each his own job ; otherwise, why pay them in first place ? And how to deal with your own daily job if you also have to shadow your lawyers ? Or hear from lawyers on every single move from their part ?
So, was this necessarily a lie from Fizzer ? I doubt so. Well, I can't be as affirmative as you have been.

This article also says "Some U.S. states follow a first use rule when determining trademark ownership (such as California). Significantly, under the first use in commerce rule an unregistered trademark owner can defeat a later-filed federal or state registered trademark, if the unregistered trademark owner can show first use in commerce before the date of the registered trademark"
According to this only line (but this is Wikipedia, not a law article indeed), I don't see Fizzer losing.

However, the article also says "States that do not follow the first use rule resolve trademark ownership disputes by determining who first filed for registration of a trademark. Regardless of use in commerce, if a business or individual later files to register the trademark, the filing to register will take precedence over an unregistered common law trademark holder's use of the trademark. The first to file is declared the owner of the trademark"
That's not a good news for Fizzer, but apparently, I'm not sure why, this does not seem to be a subject at all in the current case. Anyways, that illustrates what risks Fizzer wanted to avoid with the name registered by Activision. Was Fizzer really lying, or wrong, in saying Activision, after registration of Warzone, could go against Fizzer's name, and thus harm (to what extent ? New marketing is money, money is not unlimited) his product and business ?

Regarding the timing of the will to register (now, and not before) for Fizzer.
- We can imagine before, Fizzer could not afford (do we have an idea how much it costs roughly btw ?).
- Or that Fizzer didn't know it was possible to register a "common english name".
- Or that Fizzer didn't know that "Warzone" was actually not a so common english name.
- Or that Fizzer was afraid to lose, and / or didn't know it was possible to win, the registration battle, as not being the first ever platform using this word in its name, until Activision went for it.
- Or that Fizzer was waiting to meet the necessary criterias to be able to register a name that he is not the only one to be using. Criterias for doing so are still unclear and to be defined, but possibly still active, with economic goals, with enough MAUs and / or with global presence ? Again, for me, key to this case is definitely how we define decriptive, and draw the line, among those criterias.
All that to say, Activision should not use the "opportunist timing" as an argument against Fizzer.

For me, for these reasons, I don't see the court giving the win to Activision. So I expect Activision to settle for a $1M to buy back both the brand and domain name. If I was Fizzer, I would take it. Maybe Warlight owner refused $60k, but not sure he would refuse $100k, and Fizzer could then afford such amount.
Warlight would be "unique" (as not at all a common english word :D), and in many cases, it is even better to have a brand that has no real meaning, but is just recognizable (Google, Instagram, TikTok, and so on).

As you speculate, such big money may have been Fizzer main plans from the beginning.
I still doubt so as I doubt he spent 15 years creating a game hoping to gain retirement money in a trademark infringement. For me, his plan was just to defend his 15 years and next 20 years occupation. But ofc, nobody can tell for sure. I assume you tend to think malicious behaviour in Fizzer from the day you realised Fizzer may have been lying at some point, and was not the kind guy you were expecting and trusting. Well, as described above, all the lies are also not proven to me.
Still, even if that were the case (not proven), would you not do the same ? And if lying (not proven) were required to achieve this, but in counterparty, gaining a lot of money allowing also to invest back and improve even further the product, for its community, and maybe even refund subscribers to the crowdfunding ? Why not at the end of the day ? So, your other hypothesis of community losing is also not this obvious. And the alternative being letting your product suffer (or die, we don't know how a product lives without finding new users, as existing ones may get bored with no new stuff, including players), would you do differently ?

We're getting into uncomfortably speculative territory w.r.t. that discussion of motives. At this level, there are probably lawyers or those in the know skimming through these threads, advised not to comment themselves, either amused or frustrated by how off the mark the discussion here might be. (Conversely, there's also non-lawyers who seem to think that the law is some special domain so completely disconnected from our mundane lives that even simple questions of fact require must highly specialized legal insight to answer.) So I would like to stick to non-legal discussion (especially since your remarks about what might happen in court retread what was already discussed on pages 9-12) and chiefly focus on the credibility of public statements made about the lawsuit, the David-vs-Goliath we're-under-attack narratives from April, and how they match what is currently on the public record.

This present discussion- starting on https://www.warzone.com/Forum/543174-activision-suing-?Offset=445- is emphatically not about what might happen in court. A case like this isn't going to come down to what is or isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary, which isn't even a dictionary of American English. Nor does a forum statement from 2015 have any bearing on whether "warzone" is an "actual English word" (not some special legal question), only on the credibility of the narratives involved in raising funds for this case.

the owner of a trademark registered by the USPTO can enforce the trademark in all U.S. states, sue for damages (including lost profits), and significantly, recover attorneys' fees

Neither party claims to own the registered trademark right now, so they can't assert these rights. The case is in large part about who gets to own it. Either way, as Aerial Assault pointed out on this thread on 04/24, attorneys' fees getting awarded is an "exceptional circumstances" thing.

Not sure why Fizzer would hide this letter though

To be crystal clear, the current stance of Warzone.com is not that they sent no letter(s) between Nov. and April; in court, they do acknowledge numerous communications in that time period. We also don't need to speculate about what the lawyers did or didn't tell their client- that knowledge is already on the public record (see: the WaPo article).

Warzone.com simply disputes the characterization of the communications- i.e., whether the letter they sent on 11/20/2020 should be labeled "cease and desist" (not a special term defined by the law). They do not maintain that "All [Warzone.com] did was file opposition to the trademark" (as claimed by /u/fickerra on reddit when raising funds).

Let's walk back to the early days of this thread, when Farah asked:

They make it sound like you started this all, by sending a cease and desist letter. Now don't get me wrong, I'd have sent a ton of those already, but is this simply them trying to shift the blame to you, or is this the actual reason they're suing you?

This question touches upon whether Warzone.com "started it all" and poked the bear, rather than just whether they would specifically call the letter they sent, warning Activision about the consequences if they did not ̶c̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶s̶t̶ stop in their use of the alleged "warzone" mark, a "cease-and-desist" letter. Responses like "That's a flat-out 100% lie." and "they're lying about that. All I did was file opposition" are, for lack of a better term, provably false: Warzone certainly did more than file opposition between November and April. A "flat-out 100% lie" does not sound like it would refer to merely a semantic dispute about how to label a letter.

A reasonable person reading Warzone.com's fundraising communications about the lawsuit in April and taking them at face value would have likely concluded that Warzone.com had simply filed to oppose the trademark with the USPTO (on 11/03/2020) and then got taken to court half-a-year later, in April, after just going through the USPTO's usual dispute resolution channels.

I suspect that the people comforted by the denials of sending that letter would have been quite surprised to learn that Warzone.com indeed had sent Activision a letter warning them about potential legal ramifications ("massive damages") for Activision's use of the word "warzone" in their marketing materials, that this had sparked at least one round of settlement negotiations (in which Warzone did actually ask for what would amount to millions of dollars), and that indeed the collapse of these negotiations (triggered by Warzone.com's refusal to entertain further offers) had spurred Activision to put this dispute in front of the courts.

I assume you tend to think malicious behaviour in Fizzer

Again, I'm not interested in the intent of either party or their states of mind, only the veracity of claims and the credibility of the narrative made to persuade people to donate to a legal fund, as well as alerting you invested observers when new events occur (on the public record). In a way, you can accept that some statements just aren't that... consistent with other actions and aligned with reality, without having to point fingers at someone, guess their motivations, and call them a liar. The question of "Does this person tell the truth?" unnecessarily complicates and personalizes much narrower and simpler questions like "Is the logic of their claims sound?" and "How believable is the simplified narrative?" If you conflate the latter questions with the former, you find yourself making awkward and complex explanations like, "Sure, what was said clearly isn't actually true, but here's a charitable explanation of what they might have actually meant that helps us maintain an image of them as a 'good guy.'" Reducing everything down to a conversation about the people involved- unfalsifiable and speculative claims about the motivations of various parties and of us in discussing their actions- gets nowhere.

We could get lost trying to figure out who's the "good guy" and the "bad guy" here, or we could simply focus on whether the framing people are being given about the case, when asked to donate funds, actually matches reality.

Two fun tangents:
The law firm representing Warzone.com as of April, Newman du Wors (now seemingly Newman Law - maybe because of https://johndduwors.wordpress.com/) outlines its strategy at https://www.newmanlaw.com/how-we-win/ and https://www.newmanlaw.com/what-we-do/:

We’ve earned a reputation for razor-sharp and aggressive representation. We’ve represented plaintiffs and defendants in hundreds of intellectual-property cases in federal courts across the country—trademark, domain-name, patent, copyright, trade-secret, and publicity-rights lawsuits.

Most of our cases are in federal court, where battles are usually won or lost based on written filings. Our goal is always to win the case before trial.

An aggressively-worded cease and desist letter to bluff hard and win fast, escalating to aggressive demands and deadlines in settlement negotiations, all backfiring hard and triggering an expensive legal case, sounds right up their alley.

In the Washington Post article, Warzone.com says:

I thought we would strike a deal that would at least give me enough money to buy a new domain name.

This was in response to Activision's early offer of $10,000. Domain names can cost anything from $0 to ~$15M, but in this case perhaps the cost they're talking about is around the stated latest purchase price of warzone.com ($60,000). If that's the target, it might have been simpler to just raise $50,000 to buy a new domain . Legal fees really add up! Activision might've already spent more than that on its lawyers.

Edited 10/17/2021 19:58:23

If I'm following you (I got that from before, but it's always good to synthetise a bit the tl/dr for anyone, so as to refresh minds in details like you do, plus to make sure we / I get this right),
- Fizzer is saying all he did was "file opposition to the trademark" (on top of sending a letter to "stop in their use of the alleged "warzone" mark", which was not a "cease and desist letter"), after Activision trialed for "Warzone" registration, and that Activision "sued Warzone for the name" (from his original post starting this thread), so Fizzer says he only responded to an Activision initial attack.
- And this may be wrong, according to Activision, the letter did was a cease and desist, and this letter was the beggining of any legal action between both parts.
So either Fizzer or Activision seems to be lying about that.

Well first of all, whether Fizzer lied (not proven) on these medias (Reddit, Twitch, Gofundme, his WZ forum), this may not be appreciated by his community (unless other reasons are brought up to explain eventually). But could this be accounted against Fizzer in a legal court ? I mean, what value "some lines on the internet" could have ? And also, what value would a "lie to a community" (about who started the legal battle, with actual legal action against the counterpart) have, in an infringement case, and against a giant like Activision ?

If this is actually about justice in regards to the community fooled, we can always question about why (I gave a possible explanation before). But on the community interest, maybe they would not stop playing the game even if they knew the truth, as they play it for its quality, not for its creator. Maybe they would still help Fizzer defend himself, to protect not the creator, but their beloved game. So yes, if so, community was lied to, but maybe nothing would have been different in their behaviour and support.
Ofc it's hard to speculate for "all" funders, and if only 1 funder had changed his mind knowing the truth, may be a problem already. But not for the current court case (IMO) though.
But I would go for the "all". They didn't help as a charity for Fizzer, they helped to keep their game alive. And again, even Fizzer attacking Activision first doesn't necessarily mean he went for retirement money, but possibly just to defend himself before Activision gets the power to attack prior users of "Warzone" in their name. So the truth (or "correct statement" shall I say, as it may not be because of a lie, but possibly for other reasons, see below) is only about "did Fizzer attack first" and not "did Fizzer attack for retirement money"

Secondly, when Fizzer says in starting this thread "Activision is suing Warzone for the name", maybe he meant "Activision is going for "Warzone" as a registered name", assuming that "then they probably will sue former "warzone" users to make them stop using it".
So what if he messed up the wording of this line ? Plus I don't recall he has since corrected the wording. Either way, could a mis wording have a legal impact on such case ? And can mistake of good faith be used in this example ?
Also, this line possibly happened prior to the legal case (I don't have the exact timeframe), if so could this be used in a court ? In movies, we always hear "whatever you say may be used against you", so lines from before a court may be used. But I would imagine it does not until the suspect is explicitely warned by a person of law and order (so judge, policeman, ...) of such threat.

Whether Activision only went for "Warzone registration", and Fizzer started the legal battle, fearing for his business (or smelling cash opportunity according to other hypothesis), with a formal cease and desist letter, after Fizzer admitting in court this was the actual facts. Would this be a problem ? How else was he supposed to defend himself, against such a threat for his business ?

"you find yourself making awkward and complex explanations like, "Sure, what was said clearly isn't actually true, but here's a charitable explanation of what they might have actually meant that helps us maintain an image of them as a 'good guy.'" Reducing everything down to a conversation about the people involved- unfalsifiable and speculative claims about the motivations of various parties and of us in discussing their actions- gets nowhere." (sorry I don't see how I can quote with italic format)
Lol spotted, that's exactly what I am doing. But I'm doing so as wondering what legal impact could these "unconsistent statements" may have in a court. Also for me, "intention" in a crime, fraud, mistake, or whatever court case, does (or should) have an impact. Because when you hurt someone unintentionnally, you don't get the same sentence as when it is premeditary. So this may (or may not, since this case is not about murder) have a legal impact, so this aspect of the discussion may be relevant, I don't know.

About Duvors tl/dr. If you did read it all, too bad you didn't sum up. But also, your amount of research on this case subject, going into lawyers status, is incredible. I hope you are using these researchs also for an education paper in your law course :-).
On a totally separate subject, I don't think this is right (I read the begining) to make (not talking about you right ; the webmaster) a "public trial" on a person, one because he can't defend himself on such website (or social network in other cases), second because there are courts for that, and guilty people, for not judging him correctly, are judges in first place, they should be the ones to be exposed like this. This guy is disgusting, but if everybody was doing so against people they don't like, there would be a lot a suicide, after they lost their social, professionnal and / or family lives.

"An aggressively-worded cease and desist letter to bluff hard and win fast, escalating to aggressive demands and deadlines in settlement negotiations, all backfiring hard and triggering an expensive legal case, sounds right up their alley."
I agree (but that's only speculation). Speaking of which, maybe Fizzer is not lying when saying "All I did was file opposition", by talking for him ("I") and not about whatever his lawyers did. Well, that would be bold from him if Activision did accuse the whole Warzone organization (so both him and lawyers) and not just him. His community may not check at first indeed, but up to thinking it would never come up eventually.

"This was in response to Activision's early offer of $10,000. Domain names can cost anything from $0 to ~$15M, but in this case perhaps the cost they're talking about is around the stated latest purchase price of warzone.com ($60,000). If that's the target, it might have been simpler to just raise $50,000 to buy a new domain . Legal fees really add up! Activision might've already spent more than that on its lawyers."
I don't agree. Fizzer said $60k was a bargain, such a good one that he "jumped on it" [without long thinking before someone else grabs it]. So any other name was a less good quality price ratio. Also, changing a brand name is not just the cost of a domain, but also the marketing investment around it. And if he feels he is fraudulently stolen the brand by someone else, why would he just comply, losing his invested marketing on it, making his community repair (pay for) an injustice (well ok, that's actually a bit what he is doing, fair enough), and without claiming damages (maybe he was "in love" with this name and will have to pick a less lovely name, maybe he chose this name because it reminded him a specific memory of his childhood (sorry can't figure more relevant examples right now lol), and so on that a new name could not replace).

Edited 10/18/2021 14:33:38

@Mike: I think we're speaking past each other a little bit. Your focus seems to be on the intents, motives, and objectives of the parties. Since those are unknowable, my focus is instead on the stakes, potential outcomes, and impacts for observers. There's also some things getting lost in translation- when I said 'retirement money', I referred to the amount (enough to retire on), not the intent. Ironically, I'd considered clarifying this in an earlier post but removed the explanation to try to scale down my legendary verbosity.

Using those Du Wors allegations as an analogy, that site makes a lot of unfalsifiable allegations of ill-intent. However, none of those allegations need to be evaluated when weighing results for clients. One discussion would require psychic insight; the other only requires examining and analyzing facts on the record.

Similarly, I'm looking at the reliability of claims and narratives made about this case. We don't need to (and indeed, can't) know why these parties seek the "warzone" mark(s). To reiterate, these intents also have little to no legal bearing (beyond assigning punitive damages); our present discussion is not about what might happen in court, which has already occurred in spades on this thread.

My claim is simply that statements were made and narratives were presented, in the process of raising funds, that stand on shaky ground and contradict facts. As a result, reasonable donors and observers- like those in this thread- have made dubious inferences, ill-founded assumptions, and false or faulty conclusions, such as those about the risks of this case, the strength or "absurd"ity of various parties' claims, the stakes for Warzone players, the chain of events preceding the case, what the parties are actually asking for in court, and what's going to happen to this game.

For example, an observer of this case in April (based on GoFundMe, forum, and Reddit comments) may have concluded that the successful registration of a "warzone" mark might have led to the forced sale of the warzone.com domain or the taking down of Warzone.com's apps. However, since May 5, the word mark "warzone" has been registered in the EU (https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/018339690) for downloadable video game software and entertainment (providing online video games and associated content), and the catastrophic end-of-Warzone scenario has yet to occur in Europe. Indeed, a rough investigation of the processes involved would lead a reasonable observer to find them exceedingly unlikely. Regardless of whether claims are made and stories are told in good or bad faith, they can be true or false, probable or improbable, misleading or not. The former discussion would mainly serve the purpose of rendering judgement on the claimant, while the latter has far more utility. We don't need to analyze claims on trust. For example, when someone claims $60k is a bargain for a domain name, we can check actual prices (presently, two-word domain name "warforce.com" retails for $3k; "warmaps.com" for $20k; "wardoom.com" for $400) and even watch a live sale tracker (https://namebio.com/live) to realize that two-English-word domain names typically retail for much less than $60k, although domains that are just a single actual English word can easily reach that amount.

We don't need to speculate as to the intention of someone making a claim or crafting a narrative in order to determine whether we should believe it. We don't need to speculate as to why someone makes a set of decisions in order to determine whether they are wise or unwise, whether we should help enable them, whether the things we care about stand to gain or actually lose from our doing so.

I believe our perspectives are compatible.

(As an aside, I intend to retire from Warzone, so hopefully this will be the last response you get from me on this thread- maybe my final forum post ever, since one can dream. Cheers, and thanks for the thoughtful responses- and unusual compliments.)

Mike, are you mimicking knytes posting style?

You can never beat a master at his own game.

Seriously, Knyte will always out word you.

Mike, I can help you out. I have absolutely no problem saying out loud what you think Knyte is thinking. First let me make something clear: I can't read minds and I don't know everything that has ever happened. So what comes next is merely my philosophy based on what I do know.

It looks Fizzer has been dishonest in some ways. He has mischaracterized the events that led to where he currently is. He has, in various ways, misled his player base into believing things that aren't necessarily true. Ultimately, these lies (of omission and commission) have led to thousands of dollars in donations on his behalf to fight a frivolous lawsuit that he himself brought on. At the end of the day, it appears that Fizzer may have acted in these ways for less-than-honorable reasons.

Sadly, as Knyte pointed out, this means that there are people here who are finding out that they may have been ripped off or conned by Fizzer. They don't want to believe this, because that wouldn't make them feel good (understandably). As a result, they have a vested emotional interest in denying that Fizzer could have done this. Unfortunately, this means that they'll do whatever it takes to believe that he had altruistic motives. So when other people say nice things about Fizzer, they latch onto that. Inversely, when people claim that Fizzer has ulterior motives, they deny it - and worse, they question the motives of the people making these claims. Ironic.

To be clear: I'm not saying that everyone who is defending Fizzer and his actions believe they have been wronged. I'm also not saying that all those who feel as though they were scammed have been lying to themselves and acting argumentatively. But I am saying that this is true for some people in both instances.

I've been scammed hardcore a few times in my life - sometimes when I had desperately needed the money that I lost. It's one of the worst feelings ever (as anyone who's been there will tell you). You end up feeling sad, stupid, and guilty all at the same time. This all leads to shame, which is the head honcho of negative emotions. I can certainly understand that some people would rather just refuse to entertain the theory that they had ever been cheated. I think every time I get swindled, though, I end up a tiny bit wiser. As Modest Mouse once said "A fake Jamaican took every last dime with that scam -- It was worth it just to learn some sleight of hand."

So in conclusion, while Knyte avoids speculation, forgive me my conjecture: Fizzer saw an opportunity to make boat-loads of cash and he acted on it. It didn't work. As a last resort, he lied to his loyal supporters to fund a lawsuit that he hopes will end in his favor. If he loses, things will be okay. But he doesn't want you to think that - because without urgency, he would have to fund the lawsuit himself. And as his lawyers proclaim on their own website:

We're not cheap.

-Newman Du Wors Durrance (https://www.newmanlaw.com/how-we-win/)

Strange that there is no opposition filed in Europe. Does that mean that Warzone might only used by Warzone.com LLC in USA?

Who would be sick enough to SUE a game that not only is much better than theirs, but who took the copyrighted name first? I mean seriously... their lawsuit is absurd.
If you need motivation to donate, just use your money to buy things in-game, like coins, and you can actually get warzone coins out of your donation. Notice I used Warzone instead of the old Warlight because that's just simply what it is now. Nobody can change that!
May the WZ army prevail! :)
get it
since you use armies to play this game
haha not funny at all
anyway, activision is lame and has lost any past support I had (which was none)

Well..... at least fizzer isn’t trying to cover it up by deleating forum posts

Strange that there is no opposition filed in Europe

EU TMs are first-to-file, hard to oppose on the basis of prior use absent public recognition.

Does that mean that Warzone might only used by Warzone.com LLC in USA?

No. Activision would need to establish infringement and/or get an injunction.
Separate issue, with not only bad PR but likely varying legal hurdles in the form of prior user protections.

ripped off or conned

Alternatively, all parties' actions could be interpreted charitably as sincere and reasonable. For example:

• Activision could be suing because they want to use legal fees to shut down an indie game over its name, or because they received a demand letter implying legal consequences and decided to call its bluff by taking the matter to court themselves.
  
• Warzone might be pursuing damages and an injunction because they want to control a word and get $, or they might just be maximizing Activision's perceived legal risk to expand their negotiating range and achieve a settlement where Activision subsidizes the costs of moving away from "warzone."
  
• I might've lied about retiring to end a conversation, or I might've meant it but unwisely checked the forums when logging out of my alts and noticed an accusatory extrapolation of my own analysis that made me uncomfortable.

Or something in between. Or something else entirely.

We just don't know these why's, and we often don't realize what we don't know. See https://www.warzone.com/Forum/543174-activision-suing-?Offset=296 - had no idea then about the letter labeling dispute, so I jumped to an unnecessarily speculative conclusion about motive (probably many more examples of my failures on this front, in this thread- glass houses, right?). This thread, since its early days, has been full of speculations about intent, especially ill intent. I suggest we learn from this and stick to what's more knowable- focusing on facts, predictive models, and real outcomes- instead of giving in to a failure mode of human reasoning by confidently claiming we understand others' intent. (Not to knock on Tomfool- your post is why I think it's good to be transparent and communicative about these judgements, so they can be discussed instead of buried and left to fester as they influence our decisions and interactions. My error in post #297 spurred others to surface the information I'd missed.)

If we want to understand, then we should also be understanding.

----

and noticed an accusatory extrapolation of my own analysis that made me uncomfortable

Please don't feel uncomfortable. It wasn't an accusatory extrapolation of your own analysis.

What I said was "I have absolutely no problem saying out loud what you think Knyte is thinking." Mike has continually insinuated that you may have unscrupulous motivations. At times it seems like he outright inculpates you (the way I do Fizzer). I tried to make it clear to him that you have been avoiding speculation.

Additionally, I didn't extrapolate based on what you have been saying. I developed my own opinion based on information that has come under my own cognizance. This information came from the legal documents, Fizzer's own statements, his GoFundMe nonsense, and also what you have been saying - as well as what others have said.

----

ripped off or conned
Alternatively, all parties' actions could be interpreted charitably as sincere and reasonable...Warzone might be pursuing damages and an injunction because...

When I opined that Fizzer may be ripping people off or conning them, I wasn't talking about the lawsuit. I was referring to the GoFundMe page. Even if his motivations are as you hypothesize, and he is possibly just trying to get Activision to foot the bill for a domain transition, he would still be misleading the people from whom he is asking support.

----
Knyte - I love the things you say and the way you say them. I enjoy reading your posts. You're obviously too brilliant for your own welfare (you might want to take out an insurance policy). But I think you might be giving yourself too much credit for other people's thoughts and contentions on this matter.

I'd also like to repeat what I said at the beginning of my post:

First let me make something clear: I can't read minds and I don't know everything that has ever happened. So what comes next is merely my philosophy based on what I do know.

I agree with you entirely that we can't possibly know people's intentions and we shouldn't claim to know things which are unknowable. However, I don't think speculation is without value. Sometimes it's reasonable, and perhaps necessary, to postulate; to surmise.

----

Well..... at least fizzer isn’t trying to cover it up by deleating forum posts

That is truthfully something that has been giving me cause to stop and consider Fizzer's guiltlessness.

If I may, let me say this--
If it turns out that someday we find that Fizzer was doing the good and just thing all along - that he was needlessly and shamefully targeted by Activision; that instead of crumbling in fear and retreat, he bravely stood up to the corporate tyrant with the help of the little people who have proudly supported him all along, and in the process secured a legal precedent that will benefit intellectual property underdogs for generations:
I will happily apologize and take back everything I said.

Nevertheless, Fizzer does not have to answer to me or any of his detractors in the first place.

Also, Mike, please forgive me. I started my first post by mentioning you because I thought it was a clever way to introduce my own opinion. I love my own opinions and will use any excuse declare them.

Moreover, when I said:

Mike has continually insinuated that you may have unscrupulous motivations. At times it seems like he outright inculpates you (the way I do Fizzer).

I meant it half in jest, partly sarcastic, and a just smidge seriously.

;-)

How to win warlight argument:

-read 1000 word comments
-respond in a 5000 word comments

conditions: use formal, intellectual language

profits?

knyte bites back with 10000 word comments.


response: bar is set higher. Now you must
write a book about Fizzer's psychoanalysis and tell Activision's lawyers what they're doing wrong,
and tell them solution to win the case.

Yea what the fuck.
I for the part find it absolutely irrelevant who is "right." I just want the outcome where Fizzer will continue to support and improve the game i love without too much costs for myself.

conditions: use formal, intellectual language

Betcher ass, son!

I have found yet another video of someone talking about this dispute, this time from another lawyer. This lawyer, Leonard French, goes in-depth talking about Fizzer's counter to Activision's initial case, Activision's 1st attempt to dismiss the dispute, Fizzer's counter-statement to negate Activision dismiss plea, Activision's 2nd attempt at dismissal, and Fizzer's claims in the GoFundMe.

Video was published on 11/1/21 (Nov 1, 2021)
https://youtu.be/ft3LSNsMivk

thanks for sharing Splat! I think there's hope for our Warzone!

also thx to Splat! interesting. Especially interesting that even this lawyer does not dare to predict how the case will go. oO