Langdell: judge made "almost 100 errors"

And so the increasingly messy Edge trademark ruckus rolls on.

Edge Games boss Tim Langdell has fired off another missive to Eurogamer, accusing the judge in his recent court defeat to Future Publishing of making "unprecedented" errors in her ruling.

The new statement from his Edge Games outfit insisted that, despite Future's claim to the contrary, a "noteworthy" appeal has been filed with a UK court, detailing "almost 100 errors of fact and law" in the original judgement.

Among a lengthy list of complaints too numerous to detail in full here, Langdell argued that the judge "falsely stated" that he had admitted copying Future's Edge magazine logo, whereas the trial transcript shows he in fact denied doing so.

According to Langdell, the judge also ruled that he had handed over a 1991 disk to expert witness Steggles. He claims he actually handed over a 1995 copy of the disk.

"It was Future who tried to confuse the judge (successfully, apparently) on this issue," he claimed.

"The overall impression is that the judge could not be bothered to look at Edge's evidence since it must surely (hopefully) be unprecedented for a judge to make almost 100 errors of fact and law in a Judgment and Order, where the errors can be easily cross-checked by anyone.

"The sheer number of objectively verifiable errors by the Judge is one reason Edge is confident of prevailing on appeal."

He went on to explain how the odds were stacked against him in the original trial by virtue of Future Publishing's enormous legal team.

"Dr Langdell did not say anything untruthful at trial or in any of his witness statements," read Edge Games' statement.

"Future successfully got the judge confused so that she only thought certain things he had said had been shown untrue when they were not.

"After all, Edge was representing itself, whereas Future had a Queen's Counsel (highest level of barrister), a solicitor advocate (a solicitor approved to appear before a high court judge like a barrister) and at least four further solicitors on its team.

"Future spent almost a million pounds on this case, which it described as being most of its entire company profits for the past year," he continued. "And now Future has to spend at least that amount again on the appeal and defending the new claim."

Langdell's original character defense, published by Eurogamer last week, attempted to extend an olive branch to French developer Mobigame who had been targeted by a lawsuit in 2009 regarding its mobile game EDGE.

Studio chief David Papazian subsequently declined the peace offering, judging it to be "a cynical attempt by Tim Langdell to generate sympathy for his court case."

Following Papazian's rejection, Langdell has duly done an about turn and gone on the offensive.

"David Papazian has been once again repeating his libelous statements about Edge extorting money from people, being trademark trolls, 'should be in jail' and so forth," he wrote.

"There is and never has been any truth to this. In the past few days we have written to Papazian several times to ask him to name even one person or company Edge/Langdell has ever extorted money from or one instance where Edge/Langdell has ever acted as a trademark troll.

"So far Papazian has not been able to name a single person or company, or a single instance where we acted as trademark trolls.

"The simple fact is Edge never asked anyone for license fee money, not even Papazian - certainly not since Papazian himself demanded Edge pay him money in about June 2009," he continued.

"Edge has used its EDGE mark continuously over the past 27 years, which is not what a 'troll' would do, and Edge has never gone after people asking for license fees or threatening to sue them which is what a 'troll' would do.

"Since Papazian cannot name a single person or company we have extorted money from, or a single instance of our acting as 'trademark trolls' we have asked him to retract his prior statements and stop making them in future. He refuses, still fails to give any examples (other than obviously false ones) and is still repeating his libelous statements."

Finally, he noted that Future Publishing is yet to deny that it was them who demanded him to take legal action against Mobigame.

"All of the animosity against Edge/Langdell these past two years for starting the dispute with Mobigame should thus rightly be turned against Future," he added.