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AllSeeingSkink wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
There is a rather fun copy right law that says you are allowed to 1-1 copy a of work of intellectual property, for the purpose of learning or educating. Wahapedia fully exploits that loophole.

I've never heard of such a law. There are certain exemptions for education purposes, but it's not a blanket "you're allowed to copy if it's for education!". There's rules around being able to copy portions (not entire works) for education purposes, review, news or satire. Often there are payments made to the rights holders to allow specific education institutes (i.e. not just anyone claiming to be an educator) to copy works in ways that would normally require permission.

It's why Paul Daniels makes a ton off selling computer board schematics on Apply devices to 3rd party repair people. They pay him for the right to learn how the boards are put together. It's all off "education".

That's not at all the same. Paul Daniels doesn't make 1:1 copies and then on sell them as education, he writes his own software that can take board views and schematics. He even says on his website: "Note: Boardviews and schematics are intellectual property owned by the respective parties, as such it is not legal to distribute them with FlexBV any more than it would be to distribute SpaceX raptor engine plans with AutoCAD (no matter how impressive that would be)."

Teachers copy and make copies of educational texts on a daily basis. They also make copies of not just text books, but regular books, seminars, web training slides, and music. All without copyright violation lawsuits or fees. My wife copies whole chapters of books for reading assignments every day. Colleges are the only ones who get nailed for this, and that is because they are "For Profit" eduation, where most public schools aren't.

Copyright in itself is a stopgap measure that can't be really applied to anything that's important (science, art, education, comedy, literature... Ideas themselves).
That alone is an indicator of how the relevant laws are more on defense of power relationship, rather than progress.

To add a point to our discussion: our group effectively pool resources together. We have a group rulebook, all codexes, supplement and such... Everyone purchase what they want/need and share it with the other.
It's not pirating, but probably we would (personally) purchase less thing (book) each than what we would do if we hadn't a group.

I honestly don't know if it's illegal, since I have all the book related to my miniature, but I can browse also other codexes to have a preview of what to expect if I have a game.
For example, I buy a lot more miniature since I have some friend to share my hobby with.

Personally, if a tournament want to force me bring physical copies, it's not something I'm interested to participate or endorse.

Exactly like official GW tournament. I don't expect them to allows third party armies, but if I cannot bring a single model that I converted kitbashing... I'm not interested to be there )to me participate in a tournament is ALSO an occasion to see cool model and cool conversions).

I think the worst that could come from that sort of behavior is a SLAPP lawsuit, and even those cost the company more than they are worth most of the time.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Teachers copy and make copies of educational texts on a daily basis. They also make copies of not just text books, but regular books, seminars, web training slides, and music. All without copyright violation lawsuits or fees. My wife copies whole chapters of books for reading assignments every day. Colleges are the only ones who get nailed for this, and that is because they are "For Profit" eduation, where most public schools aren't.

I'm sure a lot of teachers do things that are illegal without (or possibly with) knowing also.

I thought maybe the US is different, but Googling around it seems to be quite similar to Australia in that no, you aren't allowed to just copy slabs of copyrighted material and say "it's for education!". There's more freedom than if you were copying something to distribute generally, but there's still limitations. I don't think you'd have a leg to stand on if you copied chapters of books to hand out for "education purposes" and weren't actually employed as a teacher / lecturer and the people you were handing it out to weren't students in your institution.

Right, Wahapedia has existed from several editions of 40k. Which is more valid proof that it's not illegal, Wahapedia existing, or your cursory glance at google results for the legality of the single most convoluted and complex mire of US legal BS in existence?

I think the guy at Wahapedia is relying on being in Russia to cover him from any copyright complications.

Incidentally, I just spent over a hundred quid on models with GW that I wouldn't have done if I couldn't go on Wahapedia and build a list (since you ask it's Blood Axes with GSC Vehicles, gonna be super cool).

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Right, Wahapedia has existed from several editions of 40k. Which is more valid proof that it's not illegal, Wahapedia existing, or your cursory glance at google results for the legality of the single most convoluted and complex mire of US legal BS in existence?

Wahapedia is a Russian website. In order for GW to have it taken down it would have to be violating Russian copyright law and the Russian regulators would have to care.

As far as educational use goes, the US and UK have almost identical laws and copying an entire chapter of a book for educational purposes is usually OK, providing the entire contents can reasonably be said to be of educational value. However, copying multiple chapters is almost certainly going to be against the law, and there is absolutely no carte blanche to make 1-1 copies of entire works for educational purposes. If the entire work is something like a short story or poem that's likely fine, but entire books or textbooks is not.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Right, Wahapedia has existed from several editions of 40k. Which is more valid proof that it's not illegal, Wahapedia existing, or your cursory glance at google results for the legality of the single most convoluted and complex mire of US legal BS in existence?

Err, yeah, I'm pretty sure Wahapedia wouldn't exist if it was based in the US or UK. Like a lot of dodgy copyright stuff, the sites that haven't been taken down are often based in Russia.

The fact you can go to China and buy a giant stack of knock offs doesn't make that legal either.

My cursory glance of google was just to confirm that the US seems to be the same as Australia in the sense that, yes, it's complex, but NO, there is no education allowance that just lets any old person copy a work 1:1 and claim "Muh Edookayshun!".

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
The fact you can go to China and buy a giant stack of knock offs doesn't make that legal either.

That's the thing, right? Our laws are dependent on which set of geopolitical lines we are occupying. What's legal and what isn't differs depending on what piece of dirt you're standing on. You can buy something in a country, visit your local embassy, and be breaking the law by possessing it (in theory, I'm not about to sit down and do the legal research to prove this beyond its face.) To say something isn't legal when all evidence points to the contrary in that legal zone doesn't seem to follow.

It's like saying (at the risk of opening a different can of worms) that firearm magazines of greater than 10 round capacity aren't legal to buy. If you're in California, that's entirely true, but if you travel 200 miles eastward, it's probably false (if you have a government issued ID from not California.)

tl;dr: The legality of something is dependent on whose laws you're following.

GW doesn't do anything about wahapedia / battlescribe etc because GW knows it makes GW more money to have people be able to look up unit stats for free than it would to gate them behind $50 codexes. They probably couldn't do anything anyway, but that hasn't stopped them from trying in the past. If you look at GW's actions re: IP, you'll note that what GW cares about is its plastic business (and to a lesser extent its IP) being infringed; infringement of their rules has never been a high priority for them.

ryzouken wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
The fact you can go to China and buy a giant stack of knock offs doesn't make that legal either.

That's the thing, right? Our laws are dependent on which set of geopolitical lines we are occupying. What's legal and what isn't differs depending on what piece of dirt you're standing on. You can buy something in a country, visit your local embassy, and be breaking the law by possessing it (in theory, I'm not about to sit down and do the legal research to prove this beyond its face.) To say something isn't legal when all evidence points to the contrary in that legal zone doesn't seem to follow.

It's like saying (at the risk of opening a different can of worms) that firearm magazines of greater than 10 round capacity aren't legal to buy. If you're in California, that's entirely true, but if you travel 200 miles eastward, it's probably false (if you have a government issued ID from not California.)

tl;dr: The legality of something is dependent on whose laws you're following.

There's also enforcement of laws. Most places have some things that are illegal but not enforced, but in some places it's more extreme. Russia and China definitely have copyright laws, my understanding is they're far less likely to be enforced. Or places like India where bribing law enforcement is common practice.


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yukishiro1 wrote:
GW doesn't do anything about wahapedia / battlescribe etc because GW knows it makes GW more money to have people be able to look up unit stats for free than it would to gate them behind $50 codexes. They probably couldn't do anything anyway, but that hasn't stopped them from trying in the past. If you look at GW's actions re: IP, you'll note that what GW cares about is its plastic business (and to a lesser extent its IP) being infringed; infringement of their rules has never been a high priority for them.

I'm pretty sure that GW's lawyers have issued take down notices for sites that share scans of books in the past (though I have noticed some OOP books have been easier to find online these days).

But sharing rules is different to sharing a word for word copy of the text (like wahapedia does). The rules structure of a game, the game mechanics, are not subject to copyright, but the actual text that makes up the rules is. I think it gets more vague when we start talking about stat lines and things though, but it's much murkier than what Wahapedia is doing where they are just copying sections of text and not just paraphrasing the effects of the rule.

But being in Russia makes it that much harder than if it were based in the west, where the website's host is far more likely to side with the claimed copyright holder and just take down the content.

From my experience I think you'd need to be pretty unlucky for a TO to a) notice that you're using a scanned/printed copy or b) actually even care, unless you went out of your way to shout out about it.

Think it's possibly even less of an issue than the 'no non-GW parts or conversions' thing that comes up all the time. In practice, you might be very unlucky and bump into a jobsworth that is having a bad day. In most cases I don't think people care. I've used completely non-GW minis in Warhammer world before on their tables, and a chap I know had his army (which was substantially non-GW bits and self sculpted) actually put on display there after some of the guys working there liked the look of it. Again, I don't think it's an issue, unless you try make it one.

If it's something that you're really worried about, why not scan/print out individual unit profiles into a word document - that way it would look less like it has been lifted from an illegal (or otherwise) copy, and more that you don't want to take your expensive books to a tournament and have them damaged or nicked..

Fezzik, if copyright law granted blanket exception to wholesale duplication of a work as long as it's distributed nominally for educational purposes, copyright would be functionally nonexistent. Try hosting a music-sharing site, or scanning and uploading popular novels, or rips of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and see how far pinky-swearing that it's for education gets you.

Strictly speaking, what your wife is doing is probably a copyright violation. Fair use does provide education as a justification, but that's only one of the tests- the amount of material duplicated is also significant. Copying a few sentences or paragraphs is usually fine, duplicating an entire chapter of a printed work might not be.

In practice, as long as you're not trying to make money off of it or undermining the copyright holder's ability to make money, nobody cares. That's how civil suits work; you're not going to get arrested for committing copyright infringement, you'll get sued if you're causing trouble for the copyright holder. If your wife were duplicating a book wholesale and providing it to students, that could absolutely bring the wrath of the publishing house down on her. 'It's for education' isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Wahapedia only survives because Russia is notoriously lax about enforcing Western intellectual property.

 catbarf wrote:
Fezzik, if copyright law granted blanket exception to wholesale duplication of a work as long as it's distributed nominally for educational purposes, copyright would be functionally nonexistent. Try hosting a music-sharing site, or scanning and uploading popular novels, or rips of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and see how far pinky-swearing that it's for education gets you.

Strictly speaking, what your wife is doing is probably a copyright violation. Fair use does provide education as a justification, but that's only one of the tests- the amount of material duplicated is also significant. Copying a few sentences or paragraphs is usually fine, duplicating an entire chapter of a printed work might not be.

In practice, as long as you're not trying to make money off of it or undermining the copyright holder's ability to make money, nobody cares. That's how civil suits work; you're not going to get arrested for committing copyright infringement, you'll get sued if you're causing trouble for the copyright holder. If your wife were duplicating a book wholesale and providing it to students, that could absolutely bring the wrath of the publishing house down on her. 'It's for education' isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Wahapedia only survives because Russia is notoriously lax about enforcing Western intellectual property.

Well, FWIW, where it is more prone to scrutiny (i.e. college level), it's required that you properly cite the original source when you're providing your students with excerpts from copyrighted sources.

As long as the original work is properly cited and the use follows the guidelines of fair use, it's generally non-issue.

@pacific

Cheers, as someone new to the current climate, and unsure of the etiquette and expectation, that's very reassuring.

All I want to point out is that it's not the massive "Nazis eating babies" moment that everyone thinks it is, to copy and use copies of books at tournaments. It's not like Hawkeye and the CIA are going to kick down the event doors, and begin Pile-driving people for not having "sanctioned" rules, in the proper format. If you saw someone using rules you knew for a fact they did not own, and had copied, would you tell the police on them?

Honestly asking here. Because that says alot about where we are as a society.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

Teachers copy and make copies of educational texts on a daily basis. They also make copies of not just text books, but regular books, seminars, web training slides, and music. All without copyright violation lawsuits or fees. My wife copies whole chapters of books for reading assignments every day. Colleges are the only ones who get nailed for this, and that is because they are "For Profit" eduation, where most public schools aren't.

The 'teachers do it doesn't mean it's legal' bit has already been covered, but it seemed relevant to mention that my daughter's school principal caused a mass panic on April Fool's day a couple of years back when he sent an email around to the teachers informing them that inspectors from the 'Copyright Enforcement Office' were visiting the school that morning and so they should make sure that their classrooms were all squared away...

 skchsan wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Fezzik, if copyright law granted blanket exception to wholesale duplication of a work as long as it's distributed nominally for educational purposes, copyright would be functionally nonexistent. Try hosting a music-sharing site, or scanning and uploading popular novels, or rips of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and see how far pinky-swearing that it's for education gets you.

Strictly speaking, what your wife is doing is probably a copyright violation. Fair use does provide education as a justification, but that's only one of the tests- the amount of material duplicated is also significant. Copying a few sentences or paragraphs is usually fine, duplicating an entire chapter of a printed work might not be.

In practice, as long as you're not trying to make money off of it or undermining the copyright holder's ability to make money, nobody cares. That's how civil suits work; you're not going to get arrested for committing copyright infringement, you'll get sued if you're causing trouble for the copyright holder. If your wife were duplicating a book wholesale and providing it to students, that could absolutely bring the wrath of the publishing house down on her. 'It's for education' isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Wahapedia only survives because Russia is notoriously lax about enforcing Western intellectual property.

Well, FWIW, where it is more prone to scrutiny (i.e. college level), it's required that you properly cite the original source when you're providing your students with excerpts from copyrighted sources.

As long as the original work is properly cited and the use follows the guidelines of fair use, it's generally non-issue.

Citing is more about plagiarism, copyright is about making money. My University lays out pretty clear guidelines in that "educational purposes" means that it has to be staff doing the copying, it has to be less than a certain amount of the original work, it can't be public (e.g. can't post it on a website that can be accessed by people outside of students enrolled in that course or leave copies floating around a classroom). Other Universities have guidelines that are more vague but they generally tend to be along similar lines.

I guess larger universities like mine are more concerned because if a copyright holder can make a claim that 400 students didn't buy a book because the professor copied too much of it and therefore that constitutes damages, that might be a legitimate claim. Whereas a teacher of a high school class with fewer students that are younger, a similar claim isn't going to hold as much weight. Doesn't make it more or less legal, just more or less enforceable.


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FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
All I want to point out is that it's not the massive "Nazis eating babies" moment that everyone thinks it is, to copy and use copies of books at tournaments. It's not like Hawkeye and the CIA are going to kick down the event doors, and begin Pile-driving people for not having "sanctioned" rules, in the proper format. If you saw someone using rules you knew for a fact they did not own, and had copied, would you tell the police on them?

Honestly asking here. Because that says alot about where we are as a society.

Fair enough, I agree some folk probably take it too much to the extreme, and it is a murky topic, but from what I've read on Wahapedia I don't think it'd remain online if it was on a host located anywhere that wasn't Russia, lol.

You mentioned Paul Daniels earlier, I assume you watch Louis Rossmann? Apple tried to get him to take down a video because it showed the location of a component on a board that would let people fix it. That's probably the closest you get to "Education" outside of an actual educational institute like a university or school. Luckily he stood up to them and said he'd only take it down if they filed a public claim so he could then use the claim to demonstrate how dodgy they are and they backed off, but it shows how companies are willing to bully people with copyright.

If you saw someone using rules you knew for a fact they did not own, and had copied, would you tell the police on them?

Honestly asking here. Because that says alot about where we are as a society.

Well it'd more be whether you'd call the copyright holder, since the police aren't going to do much, but from what I've read in this thread I think some folks probably would try to dob people in for it, lol.

I don't doubt there are a few people who would AllseeingSkink, nor do I doubt there are a few people here who ran to the principal in their early school days if they saw kids fencing with sticks, or looking at another persons homework.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
TThere is a rather fun copy right law that says you are allowed to 1-1 copy a of work of intellectual property, for the purpose of learning or educating. Wahapedia fully exploits that loophole.

I've never heard of such a law. There are certain exemptions for education purposes, but it's not a blanket "you're allowed to copy if it's for education!". There's rules around being able to copy portions (not entire works) for education purposes, review, news or satire. Often there are payments made to the rights holders to allow specific education institutes (i.e. not just anyone claiming to be an educator) to copy works in ways that would normally require permission.

At my University they're clear that Educational copyright licence is not a blanket allowance to copy, it is only limited amounts of a text, has to be done by University staff, strictly for educational purposes within the University (can't just upload it to a public server, but it can be uploaded to a unit's webpage accessible to students enrolled in that unit).

Speaking as someone who worked before doing scans in an academic library for courses, you're both kind of right (although Skink moreso). The rule of thumb as codified by UK Copyright Law right now is 10% of the book or 1 chapter may be copied for educational purposes. There are two variants of this, which I'll summarise.

-The first is for private use and may be done with no further contact with the copyright holder. No more than 1 copy may be made in such a way, and it has to be for personal use.
-The second is for general educational use and requires that you be the holder of the appropriate educational license (in the UK University sector, that would be a HE license for example). Essentially you pay a blanket fixed annual fee to the CLA (it's not a huge sum). Then when you want to make a copy for teaching using the 10%/1 chapter rule, you go to the CLA portal. Using the ISBN or whatever metadata you have, you find the entry for the work you want to make copies of, and file the paperwork to say that you're making X number of copies for X course. This licenses you to use that many copies for that purpose. Note that 'make a copy' does not equate to 'permission to republish', so these copies are usually hosted internally or handed out in paper format. There is usually a purchase option for an additional 10% or chapter if required through the CLA.

So if I were to run a university course for 'Playing Warhammer' and held the appropriate license, I could, in theory, rip just the Chapter in a GW rulebook that had all the stats and rules in it. And then upload it to a private server for all the people who were registered as my 'students'. That would be completely legal. I could even charge for the course. The trick is getting the appropriate educational licenses set up, once you've got that, everything else is gravy.

Note:- The above is working on the basis that GW books are licensable through CLA. If they're not, it might still be possible, but it complicates things beyond the point where I'd lay out a step by step process for it.

This actually makes me wonder, there is a "Gaming club" at my wife's school, mostly chess, or some online stuff like Rocket League, but if they did 40k, and the teacher got the Educational exemption, who would honestly make a stink about a teacher making copies of the BRB for all the students, and then telling them to buy the Codexes?

 Ketara wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
TThere is a rather fun copy right law that says you are allowed to 1-1 copy a of work of intellectual property, for the purpose of learning or educating. Wahapedia fully exploits that loophole.

I've never heard of such a law. There are certain exemptions for education purposes, but it's not a blanket "you're allowed to copy if it's for education!". There's rules around being able to copy portions (not entire works) for education purposes, review, news or satire. Often there are payments made to the rights holders to allow specific education institutes (i.e. not just anyone claiming to be an educator) to copy works in ways that would normally require permission.

At my University they're clear that Educational copyright licence is not a blanket allowance to copy, it is only limited amounts of a text, has to be done by University staff, strictly for educational purposes within the University (can't just upload it to a public server, but it can be uploaded to a unit's webpage accessible to students enrolled in that unit).

Speaking as someone who worked before doing scans in an academic library for courses, you're both kind of right (although Skink moreso). The rule of thumb as codified by UK Copyright Law right now is 10% of the book or 1 chapter may be copied for educational purposes. There are two variants of this, which I'll summarise.

-The first is for private use and may be done with no further contact with the copyright holder. No more than 1 copy may be made in such a way, and it has to be for personal use.
-The second is for general educational use and requires that you be the holder of the appropriate educational license (in the UK University sector, that would be a HE license for example). Essentially you pay a blanket fixed annual fee to the CLA (it's not a huge sum). Then when you want to make a copy for teaching using the 10%/1 chapter rule, you go to the CLA portal. Using the ISBN or whatever metadata you have, you find the entry for the work you want to make copies of, and file the paperwork to say that you're making X number of copies for X course. This licenses you to use that many copies for that purpose. Note that 'make a copy' does not equate to 'permission to republish', so these copies are usually hosted internally or handed out in paper format. There is usually a purchase option for an additional 10% or chapter if required through the CLA.

So if I were to run a university course for 'Playing Warhammer' and held the appropriate license, I could, in theory, rip just the Chapter in a GW rulebook that had all the stats and rules in it. And then upload it to a private server for all the people who were registered as my 'students'. That would be completely legal. I could even charge for the course. The trick is getting the appropriate educational licenses set up, once you've got that, everything else is gravy.

Note:- The above is working on the basis that GW books are licensable through CLA. If they're not, it might still be possible, but it complicates things beyond the point where I'd lay out a step by step process for it.

From what you said, it sounds like the UK has a similar setup to Australia. However, from my Googling, it seemed the US system was a bit more vague. Where Australian universities (or even schools and whatnot) talk about "education license" which has rules laid out and that is paid for either by the University or an overarching government body in the case of schools, the US seems to have more vague references to Fair Use, and guidelines varied from institution to institution and some places highlighted that the guidelines weren't law and agreements haven't been reached for universal guidelines. One US university even went to the extreme of saying avoid copying poems for students because you end up having to copy the whole poem rather than just bits of it. However, the guidelines for US educators still seemed roughly in line with Australian ones.

So it seems to me that *maybe* the UK and Australia have more clearly laid out rules for educational use where the US maybe has more broad guidelines and vague rules? Dunno, not a copyright lawyer

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
This actually makes me wonder, there is a "Gaming club" at my wife's school, mostly chess, or some online stuff like Rocket League, but if they did 40k, and the teacher got the Educational exemption, who would honestly make a stink about a teacher making copies of the BRB for all the students, and then telling them to buy the Codexes?

GW have an official Warhammer School Clubs program, which gives schools free stuff anyway.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:


From what you said, it sounds like the UK has a similar setup to Australia. However, from my Googling, it seemed the US system was a bit more vague. Where Australian universities (or even schools and whatnot) talk about "education license" which has rules laid out and that is paid for either by the University or an overarching government body in the case of schools, the US seems to have more vague references to Fair Use, and guidelines varied from institution to institution and some places highlighted that the guidelines weren't law and agreements haven't been reached for universal guidelines. One US university even went to the extreme of saying avoid copying poems for students because you end up having to copy the whole poem rather than just bits of it. However, the guidelines for US educators still seemed roughly in line with Australian ones.

So it seems to me that *maybe* the UK and Australia have more clearly laid out rules for educational use where the US maybe has more broad guidelines and vague rules?

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rough equivalent abroad, most IP law is pretty international. The wording might differ, but I'd be surprised if the substance did.

Dunno, not a copyright lawyer

I never really set out to be one either, but I've ended up weirdly knowledgeable about specific areas of IP law. First I took an interest in the Chapterhouse case back in the day. Then I worked in an academic library and had some stuff to do with it. Then historical parts of it became relevant due to my own academic research (patent law, etc) - to the point where I was actually digging around in IP law company basements for material! Then I looked at putting some business proposals together where IP was relevant and consulted a couple of lawyers about the intricacies. And so on.

Frankly, if I was looking for an alternative career at this point, I'd probably consider getting into it.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Wahapedia is no less "Illegal" or "suspect" than Battlescribe, which I would guess a large majority of the tournament crown favors. It's still 3rd party though, so put in the homework to verify.

eeeeeh. Maybe?

Wahapedia is hosted in Russia though, and Russia's stance on IP laws is "lul, get fethed". So the actual legality of wahapedia in, say, the US or UK, is virtually untestable.

That's what a lot of people aren't understanding is that what is and is not legal isn't completely settled law yet. It is a murky grey nexus of out of touch legislation crafted decades ago (or for issues decades old) applied by what is usually a geriatric judiciary trying to hammer cases into laws that didn't consider things like crowd sourcing.

It's a mess.

 PaddyMick wrote:
I think the guy at Wahapedia is relying on being in Russia to cover him from any copyright complications.

Incidentally, I just spent over a hundred quid on models with GW that I wouldn't have done if I couldn't go on Wahapedia and build a list (since you ask it's Blood Axes with GSC Vehicles, gonna be super cool).

It is entirely possible that what he is doing ISN'T illegal in russia even if it might be (and, again, unless the dude shows up in a UK or US court, this isn't a hard yes) somewhere else.




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 Ketara wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:


From what you said, it sounds like the UK has a similar setup to Australia. However, from my Googling, it seemed the US system was a bit more vague. Where Australian universities (or even schools and whatnot) talk about "education license" which has rules laid out and that is paid for either by the University or an overarching government body in the case of schools, the US seems to have more vague references to Fair Use, and guidelines varied from institution to institution and some places highlighted that the guidelines weren't law and agreements haven't been reached for universal guidelines. One US university even went to the extreme of saying avoid copying poems for students because you end up having to copy the whole poem rather than just bits of it. However, the guidelines for US educators still seemed roughly in line with Australian ones.

So it seems to me that *maybe* the UK and Australia have more clearly laid out rules for educational use where the US maybe has more broad guidelines and vague rules?

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rough equivalent abroad, most IP law is pretty international. The wording might differ, but I'd be surprised if the substance did.

Dunno, not a copyright lawyer

I never really set out to be one either, but I've ended up weirdly knowledgeable about specific areas of IP law. First I took an interest in the Chapterhouse case back in the day. Then I worked in an academic library and had some stuff to do with it. Then historical parts of it became relevant due to my own academic research (patent law, etc) - to the point where I was actually digging around in IP law company basements for material! Then I looked at putting some business proposals together where IP was relevant and consulted a couple of lawyers about the intricacies. And so on.

Frankly, if I was looking for an alternative career at this point, I'd probably consider getting into it.

For example on how complicated this gak is, chapterhouse was dinged for trademark violations. Not copyright.

To try to wrestle the discussion back to the original topic a litttle bit:

GW is repeating the fiasco with the SoB Codex, where the only way to get the new Ork Codex is going to be in the boxed set "for a short period of time," which in the case of SoB was three months. If you have a rule that people need to bring hardcopy rules, you're essentially telling Ork players they aren't allowed to play their army for an undefined period of time, unless they shell out the $200 or whatever it is for a box they may or may not want, and may or may not be able to afford.

Does this perhaps move the needle a bit for some people re: whether it's reasonable to demand everyone have a hard copy of their rules? Or should the Ork players just suck it up and either pay the $200 (if they can get a box at all, which, based on past precedent, may mean camping out on the website and ordering within 3 minutes of it becoming available) or not be able to play their armies competitively for however long GW in their wisdom deems it appropriate to lock the Ork codex behind the box?

There really needs to be a simpler way for GW to gouge the weak and poor hobbyists, and for us to get legal rule books digitally.

I mean, I know that we are currently in the 20s, what with rampant disease, alcoholism, market depression, and somehow in contrast to all things holy, swing music is popular again, but common. Give us digidexes! I'd much rather buy one of those than run the disease gamut of the interwebs looking for a russian copy.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
There really needs to be a simpler way for GW to gouge the weak and poor hobbyists, and for us to get legal rule books digitally.

I mean, I know that we are currently in the 20s, what with rampant disease, alcoholism, market depression, and somehow in contrast to all things holy, swing music is popular again, but common. Give us digidexes! I'd much rather buy one of those than run the disease gamut of the interwebs looking for a russian copy.

Hahaha, nice.

But yeah, GW does give you the option to buy a digital copy in most cases, but GW's incarnation of digital books is awful. I bought a GW epub once and never again. The formatting is horrible and it's truly painful trying to find the rule you're looking for or just reading it for that matter.

There's been times I've downloaded a pirated digital copy of a book I own simply because the official digital copy is absolute garbage.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
But yeah, GW does give you the option to buy a digital copy in most cases

GW have not released any of the 9th 40k books as ePub (or PDF) - the only digital versions of them are the (limited) ones in their App.

beast_gts wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
But yeah, GW does give you the option to buy a digital copy in most cases

GW have not released any of the 9th 40k books as ePub (or PDF) - the only digital versions of them are the (limited) ones in their App.

Huh, guess I didn't notice they'd stopped releasing them. I guess the ones I were looking at must have been 8th edition codices.