And that’s exactly it!
Back in the early 1990s, I wrote a Star Wars fan fic of a female Jedi being adopted into the Skywalker clan. Other characters included a young hotshot pilot and someone who was romantically interested in the female Jedi. If I was going by Abdin’s perspective, I could have sued Disney for stealing my idea. Nevermind the fact that I was borrowing copywritten characters from LFL, nevermind that I couldn’t copyright it or truly publish it, nevermind the fact I was only 14 when I wrote it and it was really, really bad.
The truth is, Abdin never had published his game. He never even finished it. If I recall, he didn’t even copyright it until after the whole thing gained some traction in the fan community. (Not that the copyright matters necessarily.) But Tardigrades was a work in progress. It still technically is. Abdin gave us some glimpses into his plan, but you can’t sue for copyright infringement for what’s in your brain if you haven’t put it all on paper.
There are some superficial similarities between what we’ve seen of Tardigrades and the entirety of Star Trek: Discovery. But that’s just it: they’re superficial. If Abdin’s published material had something to do with a Tardigrade that was able to be plugged into a computer and navigate the galaxy at speeds faster than light, I would be more likely to believe that this was fishy. But instead Abdin has his Tardigrade hug. And we’ll, the only characters who ended up getting close to Ripper got mauled, so... not really the same thing.
