Star Trek: Discovery Sued by Creator of Tardigrades Anas Abdin for Stealing Plotlines and Character

Jorge Arenas |

Mar 9, 2019

Anas Abdin announced he was suing CBS for stealing plotlines and characters from his game Tardigrades and putting them in Star Trek: Discovery.

Abdin announced his lawsuit in August of last year on Twitter.

I tried to prevent this as much as possible but CBS treated me in disrespect. I am officially going to court against CBS’ Star Trek Discovery https://t.co/tN238MFKzb #Tardigrades #StarTrek #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev #pixelart #adventuregames pic.twitter.com/ddiBrOKhol

— Anas Abdin 💾 (@AnasAbdin) August 21, 2018

In the linked blog post he would further elaborate why he was suing CBS.

“The last 10 months were so hard on me and the development of the project. I tried every possible way to have a respectful and reasonable discussion with CBS but they treated me in disrespect and just dangled me around with postponing meetings due to their vacations and being busy. The first conversation turned into the last one. I gave them a lot of time to make things right. Unfortunately, I found myself at a dead end with them, and so I had to enforce my rights by filing a lawsuit to treat me seriously.”

The announcement of the lawsuit followed a post from from October 2017, where Abdin detailed the similarities between his Tardigrades game and Star Trek: Discovery. Abdin specifically points to his idea about how the alien Tardigrade can be used for interstellar travel. He also points to the relationship of Hugh Colber and Paul Stamets in Star Trek: Discovery to his characters Aziz and Maciek.

Abdin announced Tardigrades production on May 8, 2014. Star Trek: Discovery was announced in 2015 and released its first episode in the Fall of 2017 on CBS All Access.

Abdin recently provided an update on the lawsuit on Twitter.

🏛️ Tardigrades Lawsuit Update https://t.co/PlnrDeoWkE #gamedev #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery #indiegames #indiegamedev #tardigrades pic.twitter.com/Vbwxjpvd8E

— Anas Abdin 💾 (@AnasAbdin) March 6, 2019

He writes on his blog:

“I filed the Opposition to the Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. Simply, I’m arguing why their “motion to dismiss the case” is not valid. Note that when the judge gave us the “discovery” right to get information from CBS about their Steam accounts, they haven’t met their deadline and we still did not get anything from them.

On their motion to dismiss, they keep on misguiding the court by stating half-truths, misquoting older cases, and even using poor examples of other tardigrades appearances in media. In fact, the more they try to defend themselves, the clearer the entire picture gets. They have no good arguments.

They are still insisting that I’m trying to own copyrights to the real-life tardigrade creature on Earth. I never claimed I did. They are omitting everything regarding its size, color, and usage in facilitating instantaneous space travel. They are trying hard to say that the tardigrade is public domain and “Scène à faire” –Scenes that necessarily result from the choice of a setting or situation-meaning that any space-themed production may use them due to their ability to survive in space. My legal complaint was/is never about tardigrades’ ability to surviving in space as they are trying to say. My complaint is simply about the fictional giant blue tardigrades that are used in instantaneous space travel with a blonde male botanist [Carter] whom had encountered interracial homosexual acts with a dark bearded male[Aziz]. “

He adds:

“They are admitting access and copying,for this one motion, but they say they’re copying the “allowable amount” because their tardigrade is shown in a few scenes while the entire show is about 11 hours long. They are saying that their tardigrade doesn’t have a major role on the show and the story. I would like to ask these questions to everyone who watched the show: What would season 1 of Star Trek Discovery look like without the tardigrade and its DNA’s help to jump instantly from one place to another? How would they jump to another dimension? How did they win the war against the Klingons? And while they were away from our dimension, didn’t the Klingons take over big portions of the galaxy because the tardigrade technology wasn’t available?”

YouTuber Nerdrotic tipped us off to this story.

What do you think of all this? Can you see the case being made that CBS stole content from an indie game? If so, do you believe Anas Abdin has the evidence to win in court? Let me know your thoughts below!