Things are spinning for Sonic the Hedgehog

First the voice of Sonic (also known as Steve Urkel) has been report on hitting his girl friend in her breast and now the Sonic world is turned upside down again with the news that Ken Penders won a copyright lawsuit that gives him the rights for the characters he made during his run of Sonic The hedgehog comics.

Ken Penders say's that

As a result, I am now officially recognized by the U.S. Government as the owner of every single SONIC and KNUCKLES story I ever created

What does this mean?

That means anyone seeking to use my characters, concepts and stories that were published in the pages of SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, various SONIC 48-page specials, various issues of SONIC SUPER SPECIALS, the PRINCESS SALLY mini-series, the SONIC'S FRIENDLY NEMESIS KNUCKLES mini-series, KNUCKLES THE DARK LEGION and the KNUCKLES THE ECHIDNA series, must first contact me for permission and to make arrangements for the use of this material.

This ruling also means that Archie wont be able to use Ken Penders characters anymore or reprint stories with his character unless they contact him first.

Which I think will be a hit for Archie since Sonic is a good selling title for the company and they sell a reprints of their stories in different formats (tbp, digest etc) The reprint point is probably the bigger issue since Archie still has rights to Sonic and a lot of the character created by sega and I guess some others and maybe can just reboot the series if they can't come to an agreement with Penders on the use of the characters.

The thing about this story is that I'm happy for Penders for getting the rights to his character but I'm surprised Archie didn't negotiate something with him before it got to a point where Penders felt that he needed to go to court.