Pretty damning for DC: The Wolf Among Us and Fables author and artist Bill Willingham has put the entire franchise into the public domain, because DC have become a bunch of dicks.
The author said he's made the decision to move everything into the public domain for "a number of reasons", including "practicality" – Willingham feels much has changed since he first signed his contract with DC Comics – and "philosophy", as his "thoughts on how to reform the trademark and copyright laws in this country (and others, I suppose) have undergone something of a radical transformation".
"At one time the Fables properties were in good hands, and now, by virtue of attrition and employee replacement, the Fables properties have fallen into bad hands," Willingham said.
"Throughout the years of my business relationship with DC, with Fables and with other intellectual properties, DC has always been in violation of their agreements with me," he alleged in his statement.
Interestingly, Willingham specifically called out Telltale's first Fables game, The Wolf Among Us, too, intimating that DC permitted Telltale to "radically alter" his "characters, settings, history, and premises of the story" and alleging that DC "tried to hide" the script from him, as well as withhold "any money for licensing the Fables rights to third parties".
"DC officers admitted that their interpretation of our publishing agreement, and the following media rights agreement, is that they could do whatever they wanted with the property," Willingham wrote.
"They could change stories or characters in any way they wanted. They had no obligation whatsoever to protect the integrity and value of the IP, either from themselves, or from third parties (Telltale Games, for instance) who want to radically alter the characters, settings, history and premises of the story (I’ve seen the script they tried to hide from me for a couple of years). Nor did they owe me any money for licensing the Fables rights to third parties, since such a license wasn’t anticipated in our original publishing agreement."
He further alleged that "when they capitulated on some of the points in a later conference call, promising on the phone to pay me back monies owed for licensing Fables to Telltale Games", they later "reneged on their word and offered the promised amount instead as a 'consulting fee', which avoided the precedent of admitting this was money owed, and included a non-disclosure agreement that would prevent me from saying anything but nice things about Telltale or the license".
Consequently, Willingham has opted to "give [Fables] away to everyone".
"If I couldn't prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands. Since I truly believe there are still more good people in the world than bad ones, I count it as a form of victory."
https://www.eurogamer.net/the-wolf-amon ... lic-domain
