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 jeff white wrote:
Reading this thread, I am certain to spend less money on gw products and to most actively source third party minis going forward. Just, awful. Gw could be a beacon… now a pariah imho. And expanding their hiring of people whose sole job is to police such ip infringement. Yeah… I am no longer a fan, not of this corporation.

I don't disagree with their business practices of going after copyright infringement. To a certain extent. When it's clearly reaching it's obviously immoral for them to strike people that are clearly not infringing on their property. I would like to note that the majority of copyright claims GW I have seen made are reasonable infringements on their copy righted works. And I'm not a huge fan of the entitlement surrounding copyright infringement, and the community at large supporting it simply because GW is a corporation. Some producers get excessively close to the line where it's questionable or outright is copyright infringement and the community defends it. We have laws for a reason. But there are some specific examples of it being over reach. So Yes GW kind of sucks. And I will never buy one of their products again, like many other people I know.

I also loathe everything else they have done and lack of morality, and possibly breaking the laws with unreasonable allegedly unlawful NDAs and such. How they've treated creators online such as youtube and their recent pandering, tokenism, and ideological leanings. "Warhammer is for everyone" Except if you disagree or believe in diversity of ideas, over collectivist rhetoric.
GW is likely just trying to soak every ounce of profit they can squeeze before they sell the company, or it collapses. I can't imagine current events have made it easy for them to maintain making and shipping physical products.

I will vote with my wallet on this one. I will never buy a GW product again. I won't buy a Wizards of the Cost product again either. And I stick to my guns. There are sooo many other options to get miniatures to paint or play with.

Saga.

Bolt Action

A bunch of really cool samurai games

Frost Grave and Stargrave

One Page Rules tho I much rather play complex rules. But just knowing other options exist it's great.

GW yes has the lore and cool miniatures. But as soon as they started making games for everyone and dumbing down the rules making it less complex and more infantile I stopped playing games and switched to painting. The reason I used to love 40k and Fantasy was that it was trying to mimic the complexity of a battlefield, and not just a glorified card game with miniatures that just happen to be there. That combined with them starting attacking the fans I stopped buying models to paint, stopped buying paint from them.

I now exclusively use other brands. Like P3 and vallejo paints. GW lost the plot. So much so that It inspired me to make my own games. If I really want to paint GW models I can strip my old armies and repaint. It's not hard. But I have zero interest in playing an infantile version of the 40k / Fantasy that I grew up with.

And I will rather take a punch in the gut than support GW moving forward, Because of their attitude towards fans.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nurglitch wrote:
I think it's less interesting to argue about what a [insert GW product here] is and who 'invented' them than it is to discuss what it is about GW's [insert GW product here] people want that 3rd parties are willing to risk provision.

Edit: I'll add, maybe GW should hand out licenses for miniatures like they hand them out for video games. Have you seen the crap that makes money wrapped in Star Wars or Marvel licensing?

This isn't a bad idea.

 Albertorius wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure what's considered copyright infringement and what's not... but let's remember the Battletech case and that it has been dismissed with prejudice.

So these, for example, are not copyright infringement:

Spoiler:

I would say it really depends on the judge/court/law etc and what country you're in. I would argue the above four images are copyright infringement or intellectual property theft, or even trademark infringement. There is a case to be made here..

If the judges throw out case it can be appealed.

But what a lot of people fail to ask is it Moral to steal the spirt of someone else design and call it your own? Are you not taking away from the creators ideas profits or sales? This is something we should be asking.

The Community is at large already fully or mostly in support of not offending people for any number of reasons. Is the idea of deliberately trying to profit off of someones ideas considered offensive? Should we ignore one version of offensive and care deeply about the other?

All I know is that small creators could end being the target of this kind of immoral behavior. Maybe it won't be today but it can happen.

Just because it's skirting what copyright infringement is, is it morally right to allow it to happen. I would say it's immoral. Do we justify being immoral because we think a company is immoral? I think that can lead to a slippery slope.

It's similar to the broken window syndrome. Person sees a broken window, and thinks hey this place is crap might as well break the other window. Another person comes along and sees the broken window and spray paints some profanity etc..

Should we encourage immoral behavior or defend creators that are clearly trying to skirt the law in order to profit off of others work? Questions we should be asking the community at large.

I have personally made my choice not to support GW again. But I don't think we should encourage theft, stealing ideas from others regardless if it's questionably legal or not. It's a difficult subject to really pin down.

Let's jut say someone make a samurai miniature or a cyber samurai mini or a steam punk samurai mini and they all are 28mm heroic scale and nearly identical looking armor with small variations? Are the creators trying to steal? Probably not Samurai are historical figures.

A space marine chaplain with skulls and power armor, vented back pack and 40k style iconography ... That's outright trying to steal. Even if it's protected under the law. So the question really boils down to morality?

Is it moral? Should we as a community continue to support it?

 Albertorius wrote:

Bayonet&Ricochet wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure what's considered copyright infringement and what's not... but let's remember the Battletech case and that it has been dismissed with prejudice.

So these, for example, are not copyright infringement:

Spoiler:

I would say it really depends on the judge/court/law etc and what country you're in. I would argue the above four images are copyright infringement or intellectual property theft, or even trademark infringement. There is a case to be made here..

If the judges throw out case it can be appealed.

I quoted those explicitly because they were involved in multiple years-long lawsuits, and after several appeals, the judges ended up ruling that it was not infringment, and repealed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the decision is completely final and no open to any further appeals or new lawsuits for related items.

For more information, just follow the link:

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Unseen

On March 1st 2017, Harmony Gold filed lawsuit against Catalyst Game Labs, Piranha Games Interactive, and Harebrained Schemes over the use of not only the four redesigned Unseen mechs, but also the Atlas and the Shadowhawk in the case of Harebrained Schemes' Battletech videogame. Catalyst Game Labs defaulted on the lawsuit, while the case against Harebrained Schemes over the Atlas, Shadowhawk, and Locust was dismissed with prejudice on April 9 2018. This still left the unseen mechs as part of the lawsuit that would still affect Catalyst Game Labs, Piranha Games Interactive, and Harebrained Schemes. After taking the copyright-trolling threats by Harmony Gold head-on, Piranha Games Interactive did not back down and in the end managed to have the case dismissed with prejudice and Harmony Gold agreeing to an undisclosed settlement that demonstratively allowed PGI, Catalyst Game Labs, and Harebrained Schemes to continue the use of the redesigned Unseen mechs. Harebrained Schemes would later re-introduce the redesigned Unseen mechs in the Heavy Metal expansion pack in 2019 and Catalyst Game Labs accompanied their public announcement about the case's dismissal with a large artwork of the redesigned Marauder by the artist Marco Mazzoni.

As to morality and copyright law themselves... well, it's complicated, but I've always found that the laws are supposed to help the little guy but always, without fail, end up helping the big corporate fish.

Ad when you have GW C&Ding small fish for skirting too near their stuff, but at the same time they release an IG mini thinly veiled cosplaying as a character from Predator, well...

It can't be argued that GW is a terrible company. But should that justify the community supporting idea theft, ripping them off? No. And for the same reason I would not like it a small independent creator being ripped off. It is still theft. And it is still Immoral. Regardless if it's barely legal.

That's for others to decide for themselves of course where the line is. But what happens when GW goes under? We justify allowing the little guys to be targeted? And as for laws always only helping the corperations, that's not always the case.

Are cooperation's inherently evil? No it depends on the company. Does it make it okay because GW is a crappy company? No GW has to employee people that made the choice of wanting to be there and may not be directly contributing to the companies board terrible ideas.

Losses in sales translate to job losses, pay cuts etc.

So I personally am not really a fan of the community's turning a blind eye to what is essentially trying to steal art. If we switch to a different medium like comics, or original characters there are a lot of people that get upset? Why are miniatures different? But that's my personal take on it.

Everyone is allowed to come up with their own ideas and thoughts.

 Albertorius wrote:

Bayonet&Ricochet wrote:
Are corporations inherently evil? No it depends on the company. Does it make it okay because GW is a crappy company? No GW has to employee people that made the choice of wanting to be there and may not be directly contributing to the companies board terrible ideas.

They kinda are, actually. They are, quite literally, amoral artificail beings whose only god is the baseline. They will, and they have, literally do anything to that end, without any second mind to whatever other interest.

Sometime to that end they need to toe the line of some "good" goal. But most of the time, they don't.

The current flurry of C&Ds is the way the GW corporation has of saying, "oh, hey, that might hurt my baseline someday, let's kill it". Sometimes that is caused by stuff that skirts too much the line with their IP. Sometimes it isn't.

Is it okay if I bring up a counterpoint.. I hope you don't find it off-putting or a personal attack. It's simply a counterpoint. But I don't consider Telsa or Elon Musk to be evil. And there are many others of course.