Ladies and Gentlemen of the Vast Empire, it is with deep regret that we must inform you that the Vast Empire must be closed. Just this week the three of us received the following e-mail from LucasArts Entertainment Company:

Dear Sirs:

It has recently come to our, LucasArts Entertainment Company (hereafter LEC), that your small gaming club has been in direct violation of our corporate web-page's Terms of Use (http://www.lucasarts.com/legal/terms/). More specifically the Ownership section. It states:

..use of any of the text, graphics, photographs, audio and/or video material or stills from audiovisual material or any other materials contained herein, for any other purpose, in any form, media or technology now known or hereafter developed, including the use of any of the aforementioned materials on any other Web site or networked computer environment, without a prior written consent from LucasArts, is expressly prohibited.

This is to include artwork and stories based on any trade marked item from any of the Lucas family of companies. While LEC has not exercised this clause in the Terms of Use before, we are now trying to cut back on the number of pages that use our material without proper permission.

LEC understands that you do this for fun and because of that we welcome you and your members to become a part of our official Star Wars gaming club when it is released later this year.

If you would like to continue your club, you may do so. LEC only asks that you remove all Star Wars references from your server as well as cease to use any game made by LEC as these games will only be allowed for use by the official Star Wars gaming club or for gaming sites with which LEC has agreements with.

We hope that you and your members continue to purchase LEC products in the future.

Sincerely,
Jeffery Snyder
Vice President Legal
Lucas Arts Entertainment Company LLC

Because we (Kadann, Threeof4, and Anakin), do not have the funds to fight this in the courts we have decided to just close down the Vast Empire domain. This decision was made after hours of thinking about what we were about to do. This was not an easy decision to come to, but there appears to be no way out of this situation. We have talked with LucasArts on this issue and there is really no way we can come to meet their demands and still keep our same atmosphere.

We will be keeping the chat room open for the next couple of weeks so that each of you can collect your friends and perhaps join other clubs, or maybe even the official club, together. As for the three of us, we have decided that we will not participate in another club like this. In our eyes, the Vast Empire is by far the best club out there, and to join someone else's would be a step down.

While we are outraged about these events, we do understand that LucasArts is just trying to protect their company and further development of thier ideas. We please ask that none of you take this as an excuse to send hate letters to LucasArts, while you may not agree with it, it is something we must deal with and no ammount of letters will stop this from happening. Express your outrage by convincing others to boycott LucasArts products, and join in our boycott as well.

We hope that most of you will keep in touch and wish you the best of luck in the future.

Good luck to all of you and keep in touch,

Kadann - Todd Schlomer
Anakin - Chris Barber
Threeof4 - Robert Robinson