Quoted from flynnibus:
What doesn't pass the sniff test to me is why the Pinbox incident would have further held back Nucore from returning to shipping. The way you address a leak is by making it antiquated. If NuCore would have released their code that was further along than pinbox and desirable.. then people have reason to buy Nucore. Pinbox still devalues them for some customers... but you can't ever put that genie back in the bottle.. so you can't hold out for 'pinbox being gone' as a gate to start shipping nucore again.
So, supposedly the WMS/PPS bridge was crossed... why hadn't nucore returned to the market? To me that's the damning point...
I actually do know what is probably the answer to this though. I have worked with and know of things in a very similar industry, not sure if I'm free to speak about them so I won't, where the licenses for older things include assuming the legal responsibility to protect the copyrights that you are being granted, copyrights that the company may not want to enforce themselves for whatever reason.
As a for instance, let's say that I wanted to release a movie on VHS tape for some reason. I might get the rights to it but the company is worried that since VHS doesn't have much of anything for copy protection that a black market of VHS will rise up, and then for me to maintain my license I would have to stop those sellers.
For IP type properties like this, it makes total sense. I don't know the exact situation, but...
- if you're Williams and someone is making unlicensed Twilight Zone plastics, you have a legal responsibility to stop that for both yourself and the TZ property. It becomes advantageous to license your property out to force someone else to pay attention to that, even if they make a few bucks remaking other things you don't want to deal with like MM trolls.
Now, think about that situation and how crazy Wayne seemed when he held that license, sending c&d letters to everyone.
I have no first hand knowledge and don't know about this specifically, but I bet dollars to donuts their license included that if it was ever pirated, they would have to try to legally stop them before sales could resume.