We don't want to face them in court, but we are still far from giving up! We want to fight on our own terms.
I'm sorry, I didn't post an answer to your idea earlier (but I am still not 100% sure myself). It certainly seems like an interesting route to take. The C&D letter was sent to us per email to our Merp website team-leader-account. And interestingly, the first thing they asked in our communications, was for a name and adress of a team leader... it's like, give us a name of someone who we can threaten to drag into court. Needless to say we were not that stupid and haven't given any names or adresses to them. Besides, we have not real leader in our team. The "team-leaders" are just the moderators of our forums at this point. We have no strict hierarchy or decision makers.
But like I said earlier in a post, we don't want to take unneccesary risks and just continue under a different name and then WB somehow gets our names through different means and then the first thing is: Our U.S.A based team members get into big trouble, because of the U.S. law money thing.
Personally, I am more on the stubborn side of the team and want to continue Merp in any way possible. So I have always an open ear for such ideas, like continuing under a different name.
I have also thought of just changing the names in the mod to something "uncopyrighted" (Gondor to Southern Kingdom - Arnor to Northern Kingdom - Rohan to Horseland etc..) But a lot of other team members hate the idea.
All it would take to get it back to LOTR would be one modder to make a sub mod and change the names back. I would bet that we would have that sub mod after a week, if not earlier.