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helium42 wrote:I believe that recasting for personal use is acceptable and perfectly legal in the US. (personal use meaning that no copy may be given away or sold)

Your "beliefs" hold no basis in US law.

What you're going with here is Fair Use, which is a oft-misunderstood section of law around these parts. You may read up on it here.

Presuming you are recasting warhams figures for your own games at home with friends, a reasonable assumption, lets apply the relevant tests for a fair use argument:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

You're not teaching the art of casting in an educational setting, you're recreating 100% of the original work, and you're utterly diminishing the market value of the copyrighted work (i.e you're recasting to avoid buying more). There is no jurisdiction in this country in which you would successfully argue a Fair Use exclusion to your activities should the copyright holder choose to sue you.

To sum up this up before the imminent and inevitable lock on this thread; lets hit the salient points:

1.) Recasting Warhams in the US is not legal;
2.) No lawyer is going to champion an argument on Dakka either way any more than actual doctors get into Wikipedia edit wars;
3.) GWS is not going to sue you if you recast minis in your house and use them with your friends;
4.) Dakka Dakka will (rightfully) shut down any threads which endorse the recasting of copyrighted works that you obviously do not have the right to recast.

I won't get into the moral implications of recasting since that's a whole other issue.

helium42 wrote:I stated in the previous thread that the Fair Use writ is far from black and white and can likely be interpreted differently depending on the judge who would hear a given case.

I hope that you email GWS and let them know of your willful infringement. After all, you clearly believe you will prevail in court, so I look forward to you setting a solid precedent for the rest of us to use.

You asked for the law, it was provided. If you're now wishing to argue with the answer, you're simply doing an end-run around the other thread being locked, just as countless discussions on this thread were locked before and will be again, unto forevermore, amen. There simply is no new data to add to these conversations.