[Newsarama] More On Radix Vs. MIT And DOD

Newsarama has posted an update to the RADIX vs DOD story.

All right. A public apology has been issued by MIT to the Lai brothers for the use of their artwork in winning the $50 million military contract. I still believe that this was an honest mistake, and that the Lais should back down from their aggressive legal stance toward MIT.

The linked Newsaram article also has some words with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s legal counsel about the legality of what happened, which doesn't seem to be under debate. At least, not any more. There was a period of time where MIT tried to cover up what happened and make excuses, but now they've come clean and admitted that they simply made a mistake.

The real culprit here is the artist who stole the images from Radix #1 and passed them off as her own. That has to be an "actionable" offense, as they say. It's strange to me that nobody seems to want her side of the story, but she could be refusing to speak. If anybody owes the Lais restitution, it would be her.

Kat posted to her blog about this story last week, but her take was more on the bizarre relationship between Sci-Fi and real technological developments. A pretty decent discussion came out of the comments on that one. If there is anybody on the planet reading this who doesn't read her blog, go there now!

I didn't comment on that take initially because it doesn't seem very strange to me that Science Fiction eventually becomes reality. To me, they're both part of the same overall future-looking endeavor of human society. Or something like that. Sci-fi is just the artistic wing of innovation, and it's basically their job to imagine what comes next while the real-life inventors are busy working on what's happening right now.