HG v Battletech

There's been an awful lot of discoveries in the last few weeks with regard to Harmony Gold v HBS/PGI/CGL(Battletech) and I'd like to summarize them for you as I currently understand them. There's a few pretty big things in here.
1: Harmony Gold is suing the above Battletech companies for copyright infringement with the Classics and the PGI versions of the mechs that were originally from Macross. Below are two examples of the designs in question.
2: The Battletech companies are claiming a variety of defenses, primarily noninfringement/derivative work but the big one is the assertion that HG doesn't have a valid copyright to these designs, pursuant to the Big West/Studio Nue v Tatsunoko case. That'll be relevant later.
3: The phrasing of the suit made it fairly clear that HG wanted to force a settlement as they did not expect The Battletech companies to want to go to court. In addition, PGI is a canadian company and could have simply argued that a washington court does not have jurisdiction to handle the suit, but not only did they accept this jurisdiction, they've demanded a trial by jury.
4: A few days ago I posted a link to a series of court filings that were HG v Tatsunoko. We now know what is in that document, and it's not a lawsuit. It's an arbitration agreement. What we learned from that document is that tatsunoko was suing HG over some sort of royalties. It was decided that HG did not breach contract and did not owe much of what was alleged, but the big meat of it was the following:
A: Harmony Gold's license reverts to tatsunoko on March 14, 2021.
B: Harmony Gold owns everything copyright-able about the series with the exception of 41 character designs that were determined to be the property of Big West in 2003, not the property of Tatsunoko.
Considering that Tatsunoko was suing HG, I doubt they're particularly pleased with them and I find it doubtful that they will opt to renew the contract with them unless there's some binding agreement we don't know about.
We also didn't know what the "41 characters" were, until someone dug up a filing from the Big West case. The list is below:
1 VF-1S FIGHTER
2 VF-1S BATTROID
3 VF-1S GERWALK
4 VF-1J FIGHTER
5 VF-1J BATTROID
6 VF-1J GERWALK
7 VF-1D FIGHTER
8 VF-1D BATTROID
9 VF-1D GERWALK
10 VF-1A FIGHTER
11 VF-1A BATTROID
12 VF-1A GERWALK
13 ARMORED VALKYRIE
14 SPARTAN
15 REGULT
16 GLAUG
17 SDF-1 BATTLE SHIP
18 SDF-1
19 PHALANX
20 DEFENDER
21 TOMAHAWK
22 QUEADLUUN-RAU
23 NOUSJADEUL-GER
24 MONSTER
25 QUEADOL-MAGDOMILLA
26 TOUGOU-GUN Emblem
27 ZENTRAEDI Emblem
28 Misa Hayase
29 Hikaru ichijo 1
30 Hikaru ichijo 2
31 Lynn Minmay 1
32 Lynn Minmay 2
33 Lynn Minmay 3
34 Lynn Minmay 4
35 Claudia La Salle
36 CAPTAIN Gloval
37 Maximilian Jeunius
38 Roy Focker
39 Milia Fallyuna Jenius
40 Bullitie
41 Exsedol Folmo
So what this appears to suggest is that it is explicitly confirmed that Harmony Gold does not own the designs it's suing the Battletech companies for, and even if they did they wouldn't in four years. Potentially this could also pave the way for Macross finally making its way to the states in a complete form.
So yeah, good week overall.