Or is this sub-series copyright held by someone else?

Do EA own all of Richard Garriots games or something?

That would be suuuuper meat boyyyy! I mean, Super Awesome!

I think there are licensing issues with the original actually because Garriot holds some rights to certain characters. Whether EA has re-release rights of completed games or not I don't know.

We shall see!

Richard Garriott only owns the name Lord British but I don't think it'll prevent EA from republishing the already existing Ultima games (He's present in Underworld 2 after all and place it starts in is Castle of Lord British). However, EA can't make new Ultima games with him as character (I don't think the rubbish Lords of Ultima mentions him at all). And yes, EA owns the rights to ALL Ultimas thru their purchase of Origin Systems that developed them (as well as Wing Commander series and bunch of other franchises).

Thats just another proof how miserable EA treats its legacy, if done right Ultima still could be another big RPG name, but 1-2 failures thanks to project management and the entire franchise was axed. Now they plaster the name over browser shovelware.
Man what would I give for another new visit to Britannia with an engine like Bethestha had it. The closest you can get now are the games Piranha Bytes does, they still have this Ultimaish vibe to it by adding a dense story to a handcrafted sandbox setting which does not hold hand.

Well there are the fan made remakes of Ultima 5 & 6 for Dungeon Siege that are pretty good but you need Dungeon Siege to play them. There's also upcoming Ultima IX Redemption for Morrowind engine and number of others but rest probably will take years to complete even if they get that far.

Here's links if you're interested:

Ultima V: Lazarus
The Ultima 6 Project
Ultima IX Redemption

Oh and best place for Ultima related news is Ultima: Aiera. It also hosts most files, both official and unofficial, related to Ultima franchise.

IX was the only offline Ultima I ever played and I must admit it stunk a bit at the time. Seeing it in Morrowind would be interesting.

Actually Ultima 9 was a dreadful experience, pretty much the only Ultima I really hated from the classical Ultima line. To some degree it was too early technologywise so they could not pull of what they had originally in mind to some degree it failed due to utter mismanagement.

Well my outrage over UIX:A has lessened over the years to point I rather call it average to good game but shitty Ultima. Major part of the reason why it ended as it did as far as I understand it is that whole developement team was shifted to help in developement of Ultima Online and when they were allowed to get back to UIX they were given limited time to complete it (1.5 years in which they had to create new engine and pretty much rewrite originally planned story (Bob White's plot) entirely) leaving it the buggy, uncanonical mess it ended up being. Had they been given more time (both pre and post release), I'm sure at least part of the problems could have been ironed out but EA decided to cut it's loses and abandon the game and ultimately the entire franchise to it's fate.

Fan led Forgotten World project attempt to fix most clarring bugs and problems (so far they've only managed to fix some music problems and fixed some scripts allowing Mariah and Jaana return to their home towns after released from guardians control) and at the same time improve visuals of the game (separate and optional Beautiful Britannia project developed concurently).

Combine Ultima IX Redemption and the OpenMW project and you'd really have something.

Most likely, yes. I'm guessing they do 1-6 (With Akebeth maybe added in because it was the direct predecessor to all that stuff) in one pack, then they do both parts of 7 and then attempt to sell you 8 and 9 separately or together as a pack.

I wonder if they can get exult in regards to U7. I mean, it's clearly a superior way to go in regards to running the thing as well as adding in some novel tweaks. Then again, even if they didn't it wouldn't exactly be hard to get exult running regardless.

I use Exult (and I love it) but I doubt they'd go that direction. It's my understanding that Exult uses a lot guesswork for the underlying mechanics (particularly combat), which might peeve a lot of people. I suspect that if GOG ever does release U7, they'll just Dosbox the original game, the same way they usually do.

I'd definitely pay for the first 6 Ultimas though. I've never played any of them.

Fortunately I still have the Ultima Collection DVD which EA released 10 years ago,
so no need to rebuy them again. Either way I am also rather convinced they simply will use dosbox instead of Exult. The game nowadays runs fine on Dosbox.
Btw. speaking of exult, getting U7 up and running properly on Exult and OSX was a mess, took me a while to figure out which folder was the correct one, since OSX does not have the launcher/installer of the windows version.