Galaxy Wide Corporation
Galaxy Wide Corporation
81 Luther Avenue, Overture
Industry: Technology
Entity type: For-profit
Product: Research, technology production, intellectual property, communication
Revenue: 15,200,000μ/AU
Motto: Only be evil when necessary.
Galaxy Wide Corporation is a for-profit company involved in research and discovery involving proprietary technology originating from the Lucidus mission, astronomical sciences research, and experimental space exploration. Galaxy Wide Corporation is headquartered in Overture and maintains an extensive satellite campus in Melody.
The company grew from a group of explorers who unwittingly became the first to discover and recover portions of a Lucidus spacecraft from the ocean floor in Randall Bay some time after the Lucidus landings. These spacecraft remnants contained Lucidian technology that had previously been presumed lost. The original discoverers and founders of Galaxy Wide Corporation sought to surreptitiously develop derivative works from this technology and profit from it, however their efforts were thwarted once the company went public with information relating to their discoveries and activities.
Galaxy Wide Corporation now operates from profits resulting from licensing and sales of original technological research, under an arrangement that provides funding to the Illuminatian government through the Bureau of Lucidian Technologies (BLT) as a royalty payable to the Illuminatian public in exchange for any technology fundamentally based upon knowledge of a Lucidian origin.
Galaxy Wide Corporation is also involved in the operation of major continent-wide commercial wireless and telekinephotography broadcasting network, Galaxy Wide Broadcasting (GWB), which it founded.
Recently, Galaxy Wide Corporation has self-funded an upstart space exploration outfit based at its Melody campus. This location was chosen for the corporation's astronomical sciences arm due to its access to remote locations deemed most suitable for its exploratory and experimental spacecraft and satellite launches.
History and background
Early in Illuminatian history, a small group of private explorers and scientists formed an organized group when they discovered the remains of a module from the Lucidus III spacecraft deep under the waters of Randall Bay, somewhere off the coast of Overture. The scientists sought to rebuild, repurpose, and develop technology based off of the materials they salvaged on this lost spacecraft fragment. They did this with hopes that these tools could once again be useful to the general public in the context of a situation where otherwise some of these technologies were feared lost or were projected to take some time to redevelop based on preserved knowledge.
However, once the general public caught wind of plans for the newly-formed Galaxy Wide Corporation to potentially profit off of these Lucidian technologies, the Illuminatian government intervened, in efforts to protect intellectual property associated with developments made upon the Lucidus mission. Seeing as how the technology Galaxy Wide Corporation possessed represented the fruit of the efforts of the crew involved in the Lucidus mission at large, the intellectual property relating to the technology that was discovered was determined to be property of the public collectively.
The Illuminatian government ultimately did not allow Galaxy Wide Corporation to continue plans to profit or maintain exclusive control over these Lucidian technologies. However, the Bureau of Lucidian Technologies, which was formed as a reaction to this episode, did concede permission for Galaxy Wide Corporation to continue its own development based on its Lucidian discoveries in exchange for royalties paid to the BLT.
Any permissions or rights to use Lucidian technologies remaining in the hands of Galaxy Wide Corporation were handed over as a fair payment to the corporation in exchange for its privately-motivated efforts to discover and retrieve the Lucidus spacecraft remains, which nobody else in Illumination had up to this point yet successfully managed.
Today
Since the original Lucidian technology and intellectual property relating to it is now considered public property, Galaxy Wide Corporation now derives its profit from original technological and scientific research and development of its own. However, the residual benefit of basing most of these advancements off of knowledge derived from Lucidian technology is a very real force, and Galaxy Wide Corporation continues to pay royalties to the Bureau of Lucidian Technologies as compensation for continuing situations in which profits from a technology at hand is directly derived from Lucidian technology that the corporation snatched from the ocean floor.
Other scientific and technology research corporations and organizations that do work based on Lucidian intellectual property are not required to pay royalties to the Bureau of Lucidian Technologies, as no other entity in Illuminatia was responsible for the type of hijinks for which Galaxy Wide Corporation is forever known. Additionally, such intellectual property is wholly considered to be in the public domain, as is any other material developed by the government, the Lucidus mission, or the public in general. Other entities basing output on Lucidian technologies at no point have or have had exclusive control over any such technology or equipment, which distinguishes them from Galaxy Wide Corporation.