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The court documents were discussed in depth in older versions of the thread on MW. Feel free to read it at leasure but it's a massive thread.
The way I understand it, the current status quo after the lawsuit in Japan is in short: Big West/Studio Nue and Tatsunoko share the copyright to SDFM, Big West and SN own the moral rights which is pretty much the designs and the right to make derivatives (aka authors right), Tatsunoko owns the economic rights which translates in them owning the footage of SDFM. Tats controls the distribution of SDFM ouside of Japan and has the world wide merchandise licensing rights again outside of Japan due to the original production agreements. Which in turn allowed HG as a licensee to use the footage and edit it but not create any derivatives other then merchandise (which oddly contains books comics and videogames). This explains why games like RT: Battlecry can use Macross character designs but RT animated sequels like Sentinels and Shadow Chronicles can't.
The problem with Harmony Gold is that they trademarked the name "Macross" in 1999-2001 in North America and most of Western Europe. The trademarks allows HG to prevent the sale of any shows or merchandise using the name Macross in these countries without HGs consent. Big West tried to get the trademark in the US at the same time as HG but the trademark agency awarded it to HG. HG recently prolonged all those trademarks (they last 10 years) to the end of the next decade.
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