I don't know about "walk free". If I were Contra Piracy, I would simply go back to Hannibal Pictures' lawyers and get them to file the suit. Clearly as the actual copyright owners, they have standing to file. Thus Contra Piracy would become a subcontractor to Hannibal Pictures, and probably clear fewer bucks, but at least it wouldn't be a complete loss.
Actual copyright holders don't want to, it doesn't scale. The scalable model is to demand settlement (marginal cost of roughly $0 after making email templates and writing IP harvesting software) not to hire expensive lawyers to actually file lawsuits.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this. You may be right. Depends on how enterprising Contra is, and how willing the studio is to engage in more than just selling some rights and walking away. It's not really that much potential revenue, the studio may not want to do any more.
