morgoth wrote:To me, there is no business difference between that and recasting.
Well, legally there's a huge difference.
GW started making mini's for other game systems, and didn't have their own IP for some time after they started.
GW has borrowed or straight up stole from dozens of other IP's.
As noted, Malekith and the Dark Elves are straight up stolen from Marveel. The 8-pointed chaos star? Taken straight from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories. Space travel dependent on mutant humans known as Navigators? Copy-pasted rom Frank Herbet's "Dune".
Both involve minimal setup work and steal sales away from the people who sold the thing and made it popular.
They involve creating their own unique work that must be distinct and distninguishable from
GW's (i.e. not a recast), their own marketing, etc.
GW's not putting any more work into creating the setting and establishing the popularity of the setting and hasn't for years, that matured quite a while ago.
I have never heard of GW producing alternative miniatures for other people's games, or of the Tolkien Estate selling a fantasy miniature wargame that GW sold alternative miniatures for.
GW's early stuff in the late 70's and early 80's, in regards to miniatures, was all making stuff for other people's games. They didn't have an IP of their own until 83 and no scifi IP until 87.
Besides, those veins run very deep, it doesn't stop at Tolkien and it encompasses all of Fantasy more or less, so it wouldn't make much sense to discuss "that" IP.
which goes for a lot of
GW's stuff as well. Slapping some 5000 year old Egyptian styling onto robots isn't something that
GW can hold an ironclad copyright on and prevent other people from doing. It's simply far too broad and vague.
This is not about taking the concept of Necrons and making your own game, this is about copying existing Necron units from the 40K game that GW made, to sell to players of that exact same game, when said game only exists so that GW can sell the models they made for it.
And just like hundreds of millions of other aftermarket alternatives in games, computers, autos, phones, firearms, game consoles, etc,
GW has to live with that.
If people want to have their own game with tomb kings in space, so be it, nobody can stop them.
If however their business model is to produce alternative models for a game that somebody else makes, without paying royalties, that's just as bad as recasting, because it's not the additional sculpt work that makes the difference here, some of which could very well have been straight kitbashing from existing necron kits by the way.
Unless they're directly advertising and marketing it as a replacement/alternative for
40k models using
GW trademarks and directly associating their products with
GW, nothing they're doing is wrong.
Chapterhouse made the mistake of using direct
GW names and directly associating their products with
GW's products. They made products that were completely indistinguishable from
GW's products, unlike Puppetswar. That's why
CH was able to be sued.
I have no idea what the law thinks of this, what I know is that those people are parasites and shouldn't be allowed to make money from someone else's hard work.
I'm afraid you're going to be wildly disappointed, and if your point of view held the force of law,
40k simply would not exist.
Just like those fake lego bricks that are compatible with lego. If there is to be any IP protection at all, it doesn't make sense that anyone can produce lego bricks. FFS the guys spent a life making that product a household name, certainly millions spreading it worldwide, and now joe mcparasite just comes in and sells his own copy bricks ? feth that. Copycats deserve nothing. Improvers deserve whatever the market wants to give them.
Lego's patent's from the early 1960's don't last forever, and have been expired for many years. You're free to make "lego compatible" stuff all day long.
The only issues comes in if you use Lego's brand name in marketing your own products.
Unless you subscribe to the Disney model of IP protections (that such should last forever until eternity and lobby
ot have such laws changed every time one of your works is near entering public domain despite the creator having been dead for decades, and suing anyone that makes anything even remotely similar), there's really nothing wrong with people doing what you're describing.
Now I may be biased because I know just how hard it is to build a company and sell a product but I'm fine with that kind of bias.
Almost nobody who did all the actual original IP work for these factions is still at Games Workshop, and
GW has much bigger issues than people making vague look-alikes.
