Hello,
My name is Neil Rodrigues and I am the Assistant Web Director at The Silver Lining. I was and still am completely involved with the directive staff, during the whole Vivendi incident. We don’t know why VU decided to contact us after 4 years of development (maybe someone showed them our trailer?) but it is completely within their rights to defend their trademark. In fact, legally they could lose their rights to it if they didn’t defend it.
We are extremely lucky that all they wanted us to change was the title, rather than the backstory, characters or anything else. If they wanted us to massively reformat the game to remove all their intellectual property, chances are this game would never see the light of day. However, I do not recommend any other fan group taking the same route we did. We took a risk by creating the game without their permission, and just as they granted us permission, they could have just as easily decided to leave us permanently shut down or worse.