[Coda]

Unfortunately, there's some confusion going on between copyright law and trademark law.

The "defend it or lose it" thing is for trademarks. That's why, for example, you had the whole Zenimax vs. Mojang thing -- if you don't defend your trademark, you lose the protections on it.

Copyright is a little different. You don't lose the protections on your copyrighted material if someone copies your stuff and you don't sue them. There is, however, a five year statute of limitations for criminal copyright charges and a three year limit on civil copyright claims. (That is, if someone made money on selling a thousand copies of your CD six years ago, you can neither press charges nor sue for damages. But if they're STILL selling copied CDs, you can still sue/press charges, even if they've been doing it for years.) However, it's been ruled that every time an infringing website is accessed, it counts as a new instance of copyright infringement.

If Tekton had taken down the website three years ago, Gaia wouldn't be able to sue and say "you copied our stuff way back then". But since a new instance of infringement happened every time someone accessed the site, Gaia is within their legal rights to file a takedown claim, and to sue (or possibly press charges) if the takedown were to be ignored.

Tekton might be able to mount a legal defense by asserting that Gaia was aware of his website for many years and didn't challenge it, thus constituting some form of consent. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but if I understand things correctly, even if this defense WORKED -- that is, if the court accepted the idea of implicit consent -- it would only protect him from criminal charges or civil damages. It wouldn't give him the right to keep using Gaia's copyrighted materials.

EDIT: It would be an interesting legal experiment for Tekton to sue Gaia for interfering with his business after they had knowingly permitted him to operate it for so long, but it would be highly unlikely to work and I would imagine most lawyers wouldn't want to take the risk of trying it.