GW sues Chapterhouse

[Laodamia]

@ brass scorpion: We don't give a s*** if you think this thread sucks. If you don't like this thread, just deal with it, and stop bothering us with annoying (and almost agressive) comments. Let the mods decide if this thread needs to be moved elsewhere. You're not a mod, so stop criticizing this thread and the people that use it.
We use this thread because we think it's useful and interesting. Since we're not geeks like you, most of us did not know about this affair between GW and CHS, and did not have the occasion to discuss about it, so this thread is pretty useful.

By the way, we don't care either what a troll is. If you know the "geektionary" by heart, good for you, but we couldn't care less. We all got what TheBitzBarn meant in his post, including you, so stop being so patronising and condescendant.

And finally, you don't like this forum? Then get the hell outa there!

[addamsfamily36]

@ brass scorpion: We don't give a s*** if you think this thread sucks. If you don't like this thread, just deal with it, and stop bothering us with annoying (and almost agressive) comments. Let the mods decide if this thread needs to be moved elsewhere. You're not a mod, so stop criticizing this thread and the people that use it.
We use this thread because we think it's useful and interesting. Since we're not geeks like you, most of us did not know about this affair between GW and CHS, and did not have the occasion to discuss about it, so this thread is pretty useful.

By the way, we don't care either what a troll is. If you know the "geektionary" by heart, good for you, but we couldn't care less. We all got what TheBitzBarn meant in his post, including you, so stop being so patronising and condescendant.

And finally, you don't like this forum? Then get the hell out

To be honest, maybe you should calm down.

I don't recall him Saying the thread sucks.

Firstly he posted links to all the relative information and discussion on the matter. I would take that as a helpful re-direction to a conversation and debate to the GW vs CHS lawsuit. Which is old news which he was redirecting the OP towards.

He was then "trolled" with scarcastic comments.

One poster posted onto the wrong thread, i read it last night and laughed myself because was obviously a simple mistake, but was quite funny. Brass just said wrong thread, again notifying the poster (you know so that they can re-post their comment in the thread they intended)

Don't take everything so personally. Text often doesn't give across the intention that you would say if you was in a conversation face to face. What i saw as helpful links provided by brass, has been interpreted as a criticism. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Did you ask?

Besides it is a duplicate thread that would normally get closed or redirected by MODs. Instead of having duplicate threads (because the mods are human after all they can't always catch everything), the thread could be changed to discuss a different aspect of the CHS vs GW situation, for example. It just prevents multiple threads all on the same topic. (which would make the forum pretty boring tbh)

[Xas]

@ brass scorpion: We don't give a s*** if you think this thread sucks. If you don't like this thread, just deal with it, and stop bothering us with annoying (and almost agressive) comments. Let the mods decide if this thread needs to be moved elsewhere. You're not a mod, so stop criticizing this thread and the people that use it.
We use this thread because we think it's useful and interesting. Since we're not geeks like you, most of us did not know about this affair between GW and CHS, and did not have the occasion to discuss about it, so this thread is pretty useful.

By the way, we don't care either what a troll is. If you know the "geektionary" by heart, good for you, but we couldn't care less. We all got what TheBitzBarn meant in his post, including you, so stop being so patronising and condescendant.

And finally, you don't like this forum? Then get the hell outa there!

I find greendhorns with 39 posts telling others what to do on a forum they joined not much more than a month ago very funny.

keep up the good work entertaining me!

[TheBitzBarn]

Most forums would have closed this thread within minutes as a duplicate since there's already a recent thread for this topic on this forum. It's only because things seem to be a bit "looser" here, maybe because there are less MODS than on most forums, that superfluous threads like this one continue to exist here.

"Trawling" as in fishing around for info or "trolling"? Trolling on forums has an entirely different meaning when used in regards to Internet forums. Here are two farily concise definitions from [url]http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=forum+troll[/url]

1) Someone who gets pleasure by typing annoying/controversial/offensive words at strangers on internet forums, for them to read.

1) A forum troll is someone who actively watches a forum. Not to be confused with a lurker, or just a forum frequenter, the troll annoys, pesters, and generally insults any thread they open.

In other words, Trolls deliberately incite dischord by posting insults, baiting people with inflammatory comments on controversial topics, etc. Most Warhammer forums, including this one, do not allow "trolling" and have Moderators to enforce it.

Are you kidding me this is exactly what I mean spending a lot of time on a forum you win you are the better Poster I did not gonna waste my time. Too many mods makes for Fascist board.

Have a Day

[Soam]

Are you kidding me this is exactly what I mean spending a lot of time on a forum you win you are the better Poster I did not gonna waste my time. Too many mods makes for Fascist board.

Have a Day

Wait... What?

[Tynskel]

You know, I guess I just don't understand the footing that GW is standing on. Look at the automotive industry, car companies don't sue part companies because they make parts that work with their cars. The part companies don't have to hide the fact that their part works with such and such car model. Maybe I understand because he used iconography that was copyrighted, but there's a huge paragraph at the bottom of the website that states there is no affiliation and he doesn't own any copyrights.

you do not know if car companies sell plans to parts to subsidiaries. Also, many car companies make deals with groups of repair shops, ect.

This is a case where a company is blatantly using someone else's intellectual property for their personal gain. We are allowed to modify GW stuff as much as we want. We can resell, remake, even cast components for ourselves. But, the instant you try to use someone else's IP for profit, you are asking for a legal nightmare.

I don't care that Chapterhouse makes good stuff. It isn't hard to obey copyright laws like these. They were obviously using GW's name to move more goods.

[scadugenga]

Wait... What?

Just nod and smile...

[weeble1000]

There's been an active discussion about the legal issues related to the Chapterhouse suit down on the Wargames Corporate Discussion board. You can find a lot of opinions and answers regarding the questions that have been raised in this thread on the various threads related to Chapterhouse down there. I'll post a little bit here though for the benefit of folks following this thread.

First, I think it's important to remember that Games-Workshop is claiming both copyright and trademark infringement. Copyrights and trademarks are different kinds of intellectual property, so it is important to keep the distinction between them in mind when discussing Games-Workshop's attempt to enforce its claimed intellectual property rights.

Trademarks are registered whereas copyrights are not. For example, "Dark Angels" is not a registered trademark of Games-Workshop, but "Warhammer 40,000" is. "Dark Angels" is therefore only enforcible as a copyright.

Because copyrights aren't registered, you must claim a copyright in order to have it legally enforced. This basically means that you say you own exclusive rights to something and then ask the court to enforce your rights under the law. This aspect of copyrights leads to two significant implications that you may not have considered:

1 - Simply claiming a copyright does not mean that you actually own it.

2 - It is therefore incumbent upon the plaintiff to prove ownership of a copyright.

Generally-speaking, a copyright grants the individual that creates something unique (story, picture, sculpture, etc.) the exclusive right to copy or display it. The key thing here is that it must be something unique. No intellectual property rights can take something out of the public domain and you aren't allowed to copy something that has already been done by someone else. Broadly-speaking, the intention of the law is to protect an individual's work and creativity without stifling the creativity or work of others.

Intellectual property in general is a sticky issue because IP rights essentially amount to a legalized monopoly. Again, the general idea behind most IP laws is to promote unique and creative advancement by giving special privileges to people that make something unique.

Considering that copyrights are intended to promote artistic expression, copyrights don't cover concepts or ideas. They only cover specific expressions of those ideas. For example, the fact that I put a skull on a uniform does not give me the right to prevent anyone else from putting a skull on a uniform. I only have the right to prevent someone from putting the skull I drew on the uniform I designed, assuming of course that both the skull and the uniform were unique.

So what does all of that mean in terms of proving ownership of a copyright? Well, in order to have copyright protection you need to have done something unique, so a big part of proving ownership of a copyright is proving that what you've made is unique from anything else that's come before it.

Once you've shown that you have something unique, in order to prove copyright infringement you need to show that the accused product copies that which makes your product unique.

For example, if person A paints a landscape and person B comes right up and paints the same landscape, person B isn't infringing person A's copyright. Both people have created their own unique expressions of the same landscape. Person B can even look at person A's painting and be inspired to paint the landscape in a similar style from the same perspective. What person B cannot do is scan a copy of person A's painting and then display it or sell it without permission from person A, unless person A sold a legal copy of the painting to person B, in which case person B can display it and even sell it; he just can't copy it and then sell multiple copies of it. Person A has the exclusive right to copy his unique expression.

Okay, so Games-Workshop is saying that Chapterhouse is copying its unique stuff, right? Absolutely. Games-Workshop is claiming that Chapterhouse copied its unique artistic expressions. Let me break down my opinions about Games-Workshop's copyright infringement claims a little bit:

1 - Just because Games-Workshop claims a copyright does not mean that it actually has rights to what it claims.

2 - Chapterhouse did not directly copy any of Games-Workshop's artistic expressions. That is a fact, by the way, not an opinion. Chapterhouse did not make molds Games-Workshop's models and then make copies of them. Chapterhouse did not even directly copy any of Games-Workshops symbols, drawings, pictures, iconography, etc.

3 - Games-Workshop only has rights to what it has actually produced and only has rights to basically the specific artistic expressions of what it did produce. For example, Games-Workshop has exclusive rights to the Rhino tank model. This copyright is incredibly thin and is almost of necessity limited to the exact model that Games-Workshop sells.

This is because Games-Workshop does not own the copyright to the idea of a tank, a troop transport, tracked vehicle, etc. etc. etc. Furthermore, nothing that is a functional element of the design is able to be copyrighted. This means that Games-Wokshop cannot say that another tank model infringes its Rhino copyright because it has tracks, an armored hull, doors, view ports, or anything else that is necessary to the function of the tank. What makes the Rhino unique is the specific expression of those ideas that Games-Workshop made, i.e. pretty much the exact Rhino model.

4 - In spite of the way copyright laws function, Games-Workshop has claimed copyrights to things as broad and unspecific as the "look and feel" of its fictional universes and the weapons and methods of waging war of every army in the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes.

Now, it is true that one could infringe a copyright by copying the "look and feel" of someone's artistic expression, but only in the sense that the accused product is substantially the same even though it isn't an exact copy. The problem here is that this kind of "look and feel" argument only really works if the "look and feel" of what you've produced is itself extremely unique. The "look and feel" of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes, as much as I love them, is so diffusely broad as to basically be the "look and feel" of the fantasy and science fiction genres.

If you want some more detailed discussions about similar issues, see my other posts. As this post is running incredibly long, I'll leave out an explanation of why Chapterhouse doesn't infringe Games-Workshop's trademarks even though it certainly used them.

[Soam]

Wow, I love it. A well explained explanation of the situation. So now my question is... Is there any precedence from other cases that my swing this case one way or the other?

[Defenestratus]

I think that the problem that chapterhouse is going to have is with the iconography - which is distinctly GW. The salamanders icons specifically.