Guilty as charged.
I've been too busy to get into the whole issue, so I was just taking other people's word on some things. Not trying to scapegoat. It's my fault too.
That's...totally fair.
Anyway, NuTSR even crowd funded their lawsuit against WOTC. A part of their lawsuit was to challenge the "Warning" portion of WOTC's electronic sales of older books.
I'm gonna try to hunt down the legal briefing on nuTSR's lawsuit tomorrow, but I just got through reading most of Wizard's counterclaim. Primarily WotC seeks an injunction to prevent the racist and exclusionary content that LaNasa made from going into publication. So this isn't actually a defamation suit, just a preliminary injunction to prevent any possible future damages. Personally, I agree one-hundred percent with Wizards on this. As long as they continue to hold the distribution rights to old Star Frontiers material, they COULD potentially see damages from LaNasa's stupid remarks. (Wizards is more than welcome to damage their brand without anyone elses help.)
As for the battle over the trademarks, I'll need to see nuTSR's evidence in full, but it looks like WotC are banking on "commonlaw" use since they continue to sell products with those marks. As I mentioned in an earlier post, that does not equate to "actively" using the marks, so LaNasa may actually have a strong claim to the names. Without any of the associated trademarks to SF, though, all he has is a legacy name. If the courts rule his claim is legitimate, he'd be in a good position to seek acquirement of the IP from Wizard's, citing exactly the reason Wizards is: conflict of interest. As I mentioned earlier, this is going to a messy, embroiled suit, and will ultimately come down to who has the deeper pockets.
But honestly, even if LaNasa wins, is anyone seriously going to buy anything from him?
I know I won't. It really seems like he has so little to gain from all this.