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Ye, wouldn't that help out? Dakka does the same and seems to get away with it, why shouldn't it work for him?

Oh, and inb4 GW sueing dakkadakka for its name. Dakkadakka is blatantly violating their IP as it's a term taken straight from 40k.

Pictures hosted on Dakka's gallery get taken down pretty quickly. If you see any, report them.

Yeah, I was not talking about Dakka as a potential hosting source.

lol@GW whiteknighters coming in and defending this. It's full-blown censorship, not "defending their IP". An IP by the way that mostly rips off other IP's.

40k is a great setting precisely because it takes away from Tolkein, Starship Troopers, Judge Dredd, Alien, and so on. However if we use GW's own standards of what constitutes copyright infringement against them, they're in deep gak.

 Harriticus wrote:
lol@GW whiteknighters

We'd gone a page or so without name-calling. Can we skip it here too?

In regards to other companies not "going after" previews and leaked pictures do you think this is down to non of them being anywhere close to GW's size and having the backing of a full time legal team? I imagine it would cost quite a bit of money for some of these companies to do it and be counter productive to small businesses.

I wouldn't have the faintest idea how close PP are compared to GW but I would imagine quite a lot smaller. I can mention Warhammer / Games Workshop to pretty much anyone (and I have) and they know straight away. Not a scientific basis by any means but...worth a punt.

 pretre wrote:

 Harriticus wrote:
lol@GW whiteknighters

We'd gone a page or so without name-calling. Can we skip it here too?

This is a REALLY GOOD IDEA.

 gr1m_dan wrote:
In regards to other companies not "going after" previews and leaked pictures do you think this is down to non of them being anywhere close to GW's size and having the backing of a full time legal team? I imagine it would cost quite a bit of money for some of these companies to do it and be counter productive to small businesses.
.

I think in the sense again that this smacks of a legal team trying to justify it's existence.

Really, how else do you explain it? Who actually likes what GW has done here (all discussions of legality aside), that which essentially amounts to repeatedly pelvic-thrusting in the face of their biggest fans?

I think the waters have been muddied a bit here by the discussion of whether something is correct or not in the eyes of the law, IP this and Copyright-that. Ultimately, it's just not a very nice way for a company to treat the fans that care so much about their game, and you have to think it wouldn't have been difficult for them to turn a blind eye, even if the site is technically 'illegal'.

 Pacific wrote:

 gr1m_dan wrote:
In regards to other companies not "going after" previews and leaked pictures do you think this is down to non of them being anywhere close to GW's size and having the backing of a full time legal team? I imagine it would cost quite a bit of money for some of these companies to do it and be counter productive to small businesses.
.

I think in the sense again that this smacks of a legal team trying to justify it's existence.

Really, how else do you explain it? Who actually likes what GW has done here (all discussions of legality aside), that which essentially amounts to repeatedly pelvic-thrusting in the face of their biggest fans?

This.

I have held off commenting too much in this thread but Pacific has hit the nail on the head here and I can no longer help myself.

GW is going after 2 sites which are huge champions of their products.

Bell of Lost Souls has a large and successful (40k centric no less) gaming convention it puts on, and GW thinks going after them is a good idea? Good idea/bad idea aside it is just wrong. The guys from Bell, and I assume Faeit although I have no personal interaction with him, are good people who love this hobby, love 40k, and love talking about it. That's who GW went after, not some re-caster or someone ripping off their rules or someone ripping off their story lines . They went after actual fans of their products people who have poured countless hours into the hobby buying, painting, building models and playing countless hours of these games and then writing all about it and drumming up support for a company that just slapped them full across the face.

That's what this is about. Not the IP law.

 Pacific wrote:
I think in the sense again that this smacks of a legal team trying to justify it's existence.

Agreed, their legal team is a bit OTT.

Really, how else do you explain it? Who actually likes what GW has done here (all discussions of legality aside), that which essentially amounts to repeatedly pelvic-thrusting in the face of their biggest fans?

Whether I like it or not, I understand it. Natfka hosts on Blogspot entire swathes of the magazine before release. I am ultimately unsure if that is legal or not, but if I was a company I would be really unhappy about that. I get he's a big fan and he's trying to promote the hobby, but hosting 20 pages of copyrighted material every month may not be the best way to do that.

Of course, if I was a company, I would probably release information a little earlier too.

The long and short of it is this though. Everyone in the community knows that GW's legal team has gone bat-feth crazy. Why would you taunt them or do things that you know will draw their ire? It isn't like this is the first time he has had action against him. It has happened repeatedly over the last year or two. If I was him, I would have found a way to do what I was doing without getting nastygrams from my service provider every month.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:


I have held off commenting too much in this thread but Pacific has hit the nail on the head here and I can no longer help myself.

GW is going after 2 sites which are huge champions of their products.

Bell of Lost Souls has a large and successful (40k centric no less) gaming convention it puts on, and GW thinks going after them is a good idea?

Could they have shown some discretion, tapped them on the shoulder and said "Hey, you're good people. We like good people. But stop posting rules and WD scans, OK? Carry on!"

Perhaps some tact could have been used.

But I'm not the head of a multinational, multimillion dollar modeling and gaming company. I put my pants on one leg at a time, then make million dollar records.

 kronk wrote:

 OverwatchCNC wrote:


I have held off commenting too much in this thread but Pacific has hit the nail on the head here and I can no longer help myself.

GW is going after 2 sites which are huge champions of their products.

Bell of Lost Souls has a large and successful (40k centric no less) gaming convention it puts on, and GW thinks going after them is a good idea?

Could they have shown some discretion, tapped them on the shoulder and said "Hey, you're good people. We like good people. But stop posting rules and WD scans, OK? Carry on!"

Perhaps some tact could have been used.

But I'm not the head of a multinational, multimillion dollar modeling and gaming company. I put my pants on one leg at a time, then make million dollar records.

Have they confirmed that the blogs being down is a result of DCMA? My impression is google removes the post, not the entire Blog. It sounds like the outage is technical not legal in nature.

nkelsch wrote:

 kronk wrote:

 OverwatchCNC wrote:


I have held off commenting too much in this thread but Pacific has hit the nail on the head here and I can no longer help myself.

GW is going after 2 sites which are huge champions of their products.

Bell of Lost Souls has a large and successful (40k centric no less) gaming convention it puts on, and GW thinks going after them is a good idea?

Could they have shown some discretion, tapped them on the shoulder and said "Hey, you're good people. We like good people. But stop posting rules and WD scans, OK? Carry on!"

Perhaps some tact could have been used.

But I'm not the head of a multinational, multimillion dollar modeling and gaming company. I put my pants on one leg at a time, then make million dollar records.

Have they confirmed that the blogs being down is a result of DCMA? My impression is google removes the post, not the entire Blog. It sounds like the outage is technical not legal in nature.

Check the BoLS forums. Bigred is beginning to say otherwise.

nkelsch wrote:
Have they confirmed that the blogs being down is a result of DCMA? My impression is google removes the post, not the entire Blog. It sounds like the outage is technical not legal in nature.

They do that the first couple times, but from the looks of that coolingeffect website, Natfka and BOLS may have received many of these notices and google may have gotten fed up.

@Pacific - I agree it seems a bit "woah what the hell" but then again I do understand why they are doing it. I am not sure how it will affect them in the future, only time will tell.

The first pictures I saw of the new Tau were via these sources plus 3++ and to be honest they did actually put me off as they were grainy as hell and looked totally crap, however, once some better quality ones were released it perked me up enough to pre-order a fair amount.

*shrugs*

The amount of time that the new leaks come out before the official announcement isn't that big now either so maybe GW could relax a bit. After all, these sites do promote GW a good deal.

I just really don't know where to sit on this one. In one aspect I understand they don't want shoddy pictures of their new releases being put around the net BUT it does create excitement throughout the community and this whole "leave it until the last minute" business just annoys me.

Whose copyright area would they be operating within by the way? Are our UK laws much different to the US? I assume they are going by the US laws...

Adding on to what Pacific said.

Sit back in your chair for a moment and seriously think "Who's better off by Games Workshop doing this?"

Is it us?
Is it GW?
Shareholders?
Allan Merrets Impenetrable IP Moat?

If we collectively cannot come to a solid conclusion on the above, this company is done.

My opinion is at the end of the day this only hurts the type of hobby they claim to want to spread. Play a game and have a beer and talk about the awesome things that happened.

No awesome things happened, there was no beer. They shut down the soapbox for two of their biggest champions the average hobbyist can understand.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

Check the BoLS forums. Bigred is beginning to say otherwise.

So BOLS has confirmed that google took them down due to legal claims? This seemed to be unclear and it seems like it would have been easy to verify.

I don't know if it's full blown death spiral at this point, but this is a long step towards a journey down 'cannibalizing your own customer base'-land. I have no idea what they're reasonably thinking here. A TON of free advertising in a media that they try their hardest to ignore exists, and they think this somehow hurts them for a CATALOG release.

 Warboss Gubbinz wrote:

Allan Merrets Impenetrable IP Moat?

It is Tom Kirby's IP fortress wall. The moat is made of the hobby centers, if I remember correctly.

nkelsch wrote:

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

Check the BoLS forums. Bigred is beginning to say otherwise.

So BOLS has confirmed that google took them down due to legal claims? This seemed to be unclear and it seems like it would have been easy to verify.

It is not 100% confirmed. And no it would not be easy to verify given the size of google and the number of departments that would be involved.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

nkelsch wrote:

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

Check the BoLS forums. Bigred is beginning to say otherwise.

So BOLS has confirmed that google took them down due to legal claims? This seemed to be unclear and it seems like it would have been easy to verify.

It is not 100% confirmed. And no it would not be easy to verify given the size of google and the number of departments that would be involved.

I would think if they send the blog owner an email for putting an infringing item in draft mode, they would have a mechanisim for alerting a blog owner if having their site shut down. So someone on BoLS would have gotten an email I assume.

I would think even if no notification went out, as simple google tech support ticket would result in a tech person being like, "yep, here is the reason right here"

I work with google hosted services every day for a living which is why I am curious about this.

 gr1m_dan wrote:
@Pacific - I agree it seems a bit "woah what the hell" but then again I do understand why they are doing it. I am not sure how it will affect them in the future, only time will tell.

The first pictures I saw of the new Tau were via these sources plus 3++ and to be honest they did actually put me off as they were grainy as hell and looked totally crap, however, once some better quality ones were released it perked me up enough to pre-order a fair amount.

*shrugs*

The amount of time that the new leaks come out before the official announcement isn't that big now either so maybe GW could relax a bit. After all, these sites do promote GW a good deal.

I just really don't know where to sit on this one. In one aspect I understand they don't want shoddy pictures of their new releases being put around the net BUT it does create excitement throughout the community and this whole "leave it until the last minute" business just annoys me.

Whose copyright area would they be operating within by the way? Are our UK laws much different to the US? I assume they are going by the US laws...

The blog is based in the US and a US law, the DMCA was used against it.

The problem with this is that the DMCA does not protect magazines, so it cannot legally be used. The GW legal people have technically perjured themselves by invoking the DMCA.

The second problem is that normal copyright does not prevent people from using pieces of material for the purpose of reporting news, comment, review and so on. This is called "fair dealing" or "fair use".

The use by the blog could be said to fall into the category of "fair dealing".

I don't know if there is a law that would enable a company to prevent a private individual from showing low quality pictures of stuff. GW could of course avoid this happening very easily by doing what most other companies do and releasing high quality information and pictures in a timely way as part of a marketing strategy.


Edited by Janthkin for obsessive-compulsive reasons; it's DMCA, not DCMA.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't know if there is a law that would enable a company to prevent a private individual from showing low quality pictures of stuff. GW could of course avoid this happening very easily by doing what most other companies do and releasing high quality information and pictures in a timely way as part of a marketing strategy.

Well yes, but sanity, intelligence, or rational thought aren't high in the priorities of their marketing division.

Or... most any marketing division, really.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The blog is based in the US and a US law, the DMCA was used against it.

The problem with this is that the DMCA does not protect magazines, so it cannot legally be used. The GW legal people have technically perjured themselves by invoking the DMCA.

The second problem is that normal copyright does not prevent people from using pieces of material for the purpose of reporting news, comment, review and so on. This is called "fair dealing" or "fair use".

The use by the blog could be said to fall into the category of "fair dealing".

I don't know if there is a law that would enable a company to prevent a private individual from showing low quality pictures of stuff. GW could of course avoid this happening very easily by doing what most other companies do and releasing high quality information and pictures in a timely way as part of a marketing strategy.

"Fair Use" is a general defense to copyright infringement allegations. However, the DMCA created a new category of copyright issues, which don't map cleanly into traditional "fair use" space - basically, there are activities forbidden by the DMCA that would likely have been permissible under traditional copyright law.

Also, "fair use" is an assertive defense against allegations of copyright infringement, and involves weighing a number of factors. While newsworthiness and/or critique may factor into a fair use analysis, so too do questions like "how much of the copyrighted work was reproduced," and "is this a commercial use?" If your site has ads, and posting leaked pages from WD drives traffic to your site, it's hard to argue against commercial use.

That said, we still don't have definitive statements about what's going on with BoLS. Coincidence or conspiracy?

 Janthkin wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The blog is based in the US and a US law, the DMCA was used against it.

The problem with this is that the DMCA does not protect magazines, so it cannot legally be used. The GW legal people have technically perjured themselves by invoking the DMCA.

The second problem is that normal copyright does not prevent people from using pieces of material for the purpose of reporting news, comment, review and so on. This is called "fair dealing" or "fair use".

The use by the blog could be said to fall into the category of "fair dealing".

I don't know if there is a law that would enable a company to prevent a private individual from showing low quality pictures of stuff. GW could of course avoid this happening very easily by doing what most other companies do and releasing high quality information and pictures in a timely way as part of a marketing strategy.

"Fair Use" is a general defense to copyright infringement allegations. However, the DMCA created a new category of copyright issues, which don't map cleanly into traditional "fair use" space - basically, there are activities forbidden by the DMCA that would likely have been permissible under traditional copyright law.

Slightly off-topic: Isn't copying DVDs one of those areas? Fair Use says you can make copies of a DVD that you own for your private use. But the DMCA says that circumventing the encryption of the DVD in order to make a Fair Use copy is illegal?

Or something to that effect.

Nope, we're not going there.

GW could salvage this. Say that they felt obligated to officially complain, and they dindt mean for the whole sites to get blown up. Make a backroom deal with Natfka and BoLS that if they do less of the stuff they don't like, they would help them do more stuff they do like. I think what upsets so many is that we would all want, or at least understand, if this were to happen, but with GW, we know it won't. They can make any situation a bad one.

The thing that things like this always drive home to me is how much of the content we use on a daily basis is under a Google label. Throw in how much business is done through Amazon and its associated brands. That is so much traffic, information,and commerce that relies on just a few companies, especially for ones not always know as bright bastions of benevolence and bravery.

 Janthkin wrote:
Nope, we're not going there.

Fair enough, I was not that curious about specifics. Just wondering if that was one of those areas of "Fair Use" in Copyright vs specific DMCA provisions that contradict that areas. So not really a "can we copy DVDs" but more "Fair Use is okay, but ways to get Fair Use are not" kind of question.

But I understand not wanting to get into specifics.

It would be really funny if it turned out that Faeit 212 was really Kirby.

Rorschach9 wrote:100% correct. As much as people like to rail against the man and say they're just being a bunch of jerks (or insert profanity of choice here), GW has no choice but to defend their IP and copyright. If they don't, they lose the ability to defend it in the future. It doesn't matter if it's a small infringement or large, they have the legal obligation to defend it.

I'm not saying it's been done the right way, but it is something they absolutely *have* to do.

it's been explained several times in quite a bit of detail why Games Workshop is totally, unambiguously wrong, and by extension, why you also are totally, unambiguously wrong. It's just mind boggling how many people are simply immune to reality.

Rorschach9 wrote:Good lord, everyone is a legal expert on the internet aren't they?

The amount of disinformation (or at the very least incorrect and misunderstood information) in this thread is amazing.

/headexplode