What's up with Talsorian stuff?

The Talsorian weapons/ Vanguard merit weapons were a nod to R. Talsorian game company.

i just spent a little while browsing the revived R. Talsorian site. Owning many of their games, and having enjoyed much of the design of Cyberpunk 2020, Mekton Zeta and Cybergeneration, i wonder if those currently running things have any connection with the original people. Much of the site has the mid-90's high school student's Geocities page look and feel, with similar design and loading speeds, and the promotional/introductory materials have typos along the lines of spelling character 'charcter'. No animated .gifs of dripping blood or spinning skulls as section breaks, so i guess it wasn't quite that bad. Still, it made me a little sad.

Edit: *heh* They spell Falkenstein 'Falkenstien' directly opposite an image of the game's cover that shows the correct spelling...

Edit 2: Actually, the more i browse the site the sadder i feel. Wow, it's... not good.

I feel like I am the only person that has never heard of them.....

R. Talsorian did some of the early Cyberpunk-oriented tabletop RPGs. They had a gritty feeling with lots of Japanese flavor (from back when it seemed that the Japanese would take over the world, though everyone knows now that it's gonna be the Chinese and the Indians ).

Unfortunately, R. Talsorian has to be careful about their trademark. If you hold a trademark or copyright, and knowingly neglect to defend it, you can lose it. It's not that they're being bastards about it, it's simply a requirement for companies that wish to maintain their trademarks. The only way to keep using the name in the game would be for the two companies to enter a contract granting CoH specific rights to the use of the name, but I'm sure neither company wants to waste time and money on something so minor. So it's just better all around to take the name out and keep both IPs "pure."

Most people display little understanding of the difference between copyright and trademark, and what sorts of things are subject to them. Trademarks are essentially reserved names within a particular field that companies can keep forever (company names, product names, etc.), while copyrights are placed on specific works (books, movies, games) for a limited (though quite long) time. Patents have a much shorter period of exclusivity than a copyright, but with very broad potential for licensing.

There is a great deal of disagreement about what sorts of things are patentable these days, resulting in numerous preposterous patents in the software industry (like Apple's recent application for a patent for forcing you to watch ads).