Thank goodness for the American court system. If there’s an issue it will take care of it no matter how long it takes. Or maybe it’s the other way around and they’ll make an issue take longer than it ever should because of the loopholes and scheduling that occur within the system. I don’t actually know, I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that it doesn’t look like the Interplay vs. Bethesda lawsuit won’t be ending any time soon.
While a judge has already ruled that Bethesda’s perliminary injuction to stop Interplay from selling the Fallout franchise was not legal, the battle still rages on for who will eventually own all the rights to the Fallout MMO and if Interplay has actually broken its contract with Bethesda concerning the game. Now that fight has a schedule, or to be more apt, the precursor to the fight has a schedule. According to the filing schedule that Duck and Cover uncovered it appears that a court case won’t actually be taking place until 2011 as the draft pretrial order (whatever that is) isn’t even due until Dec. 30 of this year. Drafts of pretrials! That doesn’t sound anywhere near a resolution.
As the poster at Duck and Cover commented this could give Bethesda a chance to really just wait until Interplay goes dry. Then again, maybe they could really rush this through and we’ll have a resolution sooner than we thought. The schedule is after the jump.
- Motion(s) for Joinder of Parties and Amendment of Pleadings to be filed by: February 28, 2010
- Requests for Production and Interrogatories to Parties to be served by:1 March 30, 2010
- Third Party Discovery to be taken by: July 2, 2010
- Fact Depositions to be taken by: July 16, 2010
- Rule 26(a)(2) Expert Witness Disclosure to be served by: August 13, 2010
- Rule 26(a) (2) Expert witness depositions to be taken by: September 30, 2010
- Requests for Admission to be served by: October 8, 2010
- Rebuttal Expert Report(s) to be served by: October 22, 2010
- Rebuttal Expert depositions to be taken by: November 19, 2010
- Summary Judgment(s) Motions to filed on or before: December 3, 2010
- Bethesda to circulate draft pretrial order: December 10, 2010
- Interplay to comment on draft pretrial order: December 17, 2010
- File draft pretrial order to be filed by: December 30, 2010
