Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

caladancid wrote:
https://jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-apply/infringements-assistant

"Would you like to assist in protecting Games Workshop?



We are always keen to ensure continuous improvement of our processes, so you will be involved in researching and identifying new ways for Games Workshop to approach infringing and counterfeit product removal and implementing improvements to the infringements process."

Brilliant! New assistant, no legal expertise(probably not 100% aware of what an infringement is), underpaid and instructed to find NEW ways to frag "infringements" if he wants to shine.

Brace yourself guys its going to be fun to watch this.... I would say to reviewers, content creators to simply drop GW but what do I know.

Stranger83 wrote:

https://www.wipo.int/members/en/

Membership had nothing to do with the EU, EU member states are signed up individually and not as part of the EU

That is also true of EURATOM, yet our government threw in that we were leaving that as well in their Article 50 letter. Which then required us to negotiate a new Nuclear Cooperation Agreement or risk losing access to nuclear materials, research, safety and regulation enforcement etc.

yukishiro1 wrote:
GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

If this is the case - report them to the relevant authorities. In the UK that's the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), as acting without honesty or integrity violates their principles.

caladancid wrote:

TheGoodGerman wrote:

Mario wrote:

TheGoodGerman wrote:In that case he has nothing to fear and his objection will go through.

I think the video was demonetised. Meaning they get no money during that time from that video and by the time his objection goes through and it's reinstated the peak monetisation phase is gone. You don't get that back just because your video is monetised later on (for the little bit of a long tail that a video tends to have on average).

If somebody makes their money from these reviews and a company were to do that every time a somewhat critical review appears then that creates a chilling effect for the reviewer, even if things are technically corrected after a few weeks. That's is one of these "technically correct" statements that are, in practice, ignorant of the circumstances that cause the real damage.

OK, that makes sense, I didn‘t take that into account.

I guess this is one of the risks when a „content creator“ signs up to that giant company YouTube’s terms.

Maybe I am misreading what you wrote, or not interpreting it correctly, and if so I apologize up front.

Probably. Apology accepted.

But, are you still saying that we should hold GW accountable? It looks like, and again maybe I am imputing something to you that isn't true, you are bending over backwards to not have any blame on GW. If that is the case I am interested to know why? YouTube's policies, or any other policies, don't seem to matter if GW's behavior was better.

GW is to blame for its actions and I have called them stupid myself. They're just not this evil superorganization, but just a regular large-ish company that behaves mostly normal (and does dumb stuff occasionally, because people who work also make mistakes). From what I see their cultural problem could be that they are mostly immune against the consequences of their mistakes because their products sell like hot cake whatever they do - so they go from success to success and there is no incentive to question things.

Also I don't see much wrongdoing in the specific cases we're discussing here:

- They have a job advert for a junior role that happens to be in their IP protection team. Big deal. The uproar on this forum about it is out of proportion.

- They went after Midwinter because of this Warhammerplus review video. That is a stupid move and if they had watched the video, they should know there is nothing to win for them really. As „The Phazer" points out (with a citation wrongly attributed to me), it's likely that no human had actually reviewed the video before they "struck". This would be a plausible explanation, because their specialized IP law team likely isn't that stupid.

It is possible for "normal" behaviour of a company to still be unethical. It is perfectly normal for companies to exploit cheap labour with wages barely sufficient to allow workers to live, to the point that Fair Trade became a thing to distinguish the few companies which didn't do that.

beast_gts wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

If this is the case - report them to the relevant authorities. In the UK that's the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), as acting without honesty or integrity violates their principles.

I think you are confused here. That organization regulates solicitors, i.e. law firms, or similar organizations. GW isn't a solicitor. It isn't regulated by any sort of bar organization.

GW employs 6 regulated solicitors according to the website, but to get the SRA involved, you would have to prove they were behind the decision to make the youtube IP complaint, and were doing so dishonestly with the full knowledge that what they were doing was against the law.

Obviously there is going to be no such proof - they likely aren't involved at all in the decision to issue the strike, and if they were, they're hardly going to leave a paper trail saying "yeah, we know this is bogus, but we're going to do it anyway because we can! mwahahahaha!"

 NAVARRO wrote:

caladancid wrote:
https://jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-apply/infringements-assistant

"Would you like to assist in protecting Games Workshop?



We are always keen to ensure continuous improvement of our processes, so you will be involved in researching and identifying new ways for Games Workshop to approach infringing and counterfeit product removal and implementing improvements to the infringements process."

Brilliant! New assistant, no legal expertise(probably not 100% aware of what an infringement is), underpaid and instructed to find NEW ways to frag "infringements" if he wants to shine.

Brace yourself guys its going to be fun to watch this.... I would say to reviewers, content creators to simply drop GW but what do I know.

Or maybe you are reading too much into this. The advert says the new person will be part of the legal team. That team will also have lawyers.

The non-lawyer legal assistants I work with are brilliant. Still they wouldn't send out lawyerly stuff without at least a signoff.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
It is possible for "normal" behaviour of a company to still be unethical. It is perfectly normal for companies to exploit cheap labour with wages barely sufficient to allow workers to live, to the point that Fair Trade became a thing to distinguish the few companies which didn't do that.

Well yes. But that would be socialism, right?

From where I stand, the UK runs a more extreme model of exploitative capitalism than where I'm from, and many practices you have would simply not be legal where I live (see e.g. zero-hours contracts). GW is hardly exceptional in UK with its subpar working conditions. Discussing societal changes leads too far here and goes way beyond GW anyway. The point with GW is just: they could be a role model in this field because they are basically printing money now.

 frankelee wrote:
If you're gonna take down GW for being too reporty about Youtube videos, take down Sony and Disney while you're at it. They used to go nuts with copyright claiming reviewers.

Gladly.

Ooof, "Disney do it too" is really not a good defence my guy

No kidding, but it isn't even "Disney does it too," it's "Disney used to do it too."

yukishiro1 wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
If you're gonna take down GW for being too reporty about Youtube videos, take down Sony and Disney while you're at it. They used to go nuts with copyright claiming reviewers.

This is just a great illustration of a misguided way to defend someone. It's both irrelevant - like a drunk driver who defends himself at trial by saying "everybody does it! if you don't prosecute all of them too it's unfair to prosecute me!" - and wrong even on its own terms: you state that these companies "used" to do the thing GW is doing now, by definition implying they no longer do so.

Some things can't be defended, and all attempting it does is void one's own credibility. GW's action on Midwinter's video is one of these times. It is clearly a review, and the amount of content he shows is clearly for the purpose of reviewing it. There's no way GW's IP objection here would be upheld. But it doesn't need to be, because GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

"It's a review, therefore he can include any amount of copyrighted content he wants because it's for a review" is not how it works. A review can still be infringement.

You trying to claim that there's "no way" that when a 10 minute video includes a mix of random video footage of the app in use including showing copyrighted content such as rules, articles, white dwarf pages, parts of several animations, music and more with quite a lot of it shown just shown because of a general theme of " it's part of warhammer+", that there's no chance at all that it could possibly be determined that it may feature too much of their copyrighted material without enough of a reason for all that (whether all that actually would count or not is besides the point as that could only be fully determined via things going further than this) and that instead GW demonetizing that video must be them knowingly trying to abuse IP law has to be the most absurd take of this whole thing I've seen.

yukishiro1 wrote:
No kidding, but it isn't even "Disney does it too," it's "Disney used to do it too."

I think this is probably the most misguided thing anyone has said in this thread. 'Used to' lol.

That said, fair use is an argument. Not a statute.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
If you're gonna take down GW for being too reporty about Youtube videos, take down Sony and Disney while you're at it. They used to go nuts with copyright claiming reviewers.

This is just a great illustration of a misguided way to defend someone. It's both irrelevant - like a drunk driver who defends himself at trial by saying "everybody does it! if you don't prosecute all of them too it's unfair to prosecute me!" - and wrong even on its own terms: you state that these companies "used" to do the thing GW is doing now, by definition implying they no longer do so.

Some things can't be defended, and all attempting it does is void one's own credibility. GW's action on Midwinter's video is one of these times. It is clearly a review, and the amount of content he shows is clearly for the purpose of reviewing it. There's no way GW's IP objection here would be upheld. But it doesn't need to be, because GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

"It's a review, therefore he can include any amount of copyrighted content he wants because it's for a review" is not how it works. A review can still be infringement.

You trying to claim that there's "no way" that when a 10 minute video includes a mix of random video footage of the app in use including showing copyrighted content such as rules, articles, white dwarf pages, parts of several animations, music and more beyond what is needed (as in, it's just shown for little reason beyond just a general theme of " it's part of warhammer+") that there's no chance at all that it could possibly be determined that it may feature too much of their copyrighted material without enough of a reason for all that (whether all that actually would count or not is besides the point as that could only be fully determined via things going further than this) and that instead GW demonetizing that video must be them knowingly trying to abuse IP law has to be the most absurd take of this whole thing I've seen.

"Including video footage of the thing you're reviewing in a review is bad and evil and GW is entirely in the right"

What?

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
If you're gonna take down GW for being too reporty about Youtube videos, take down Sony and Disney while you're at it. They used to go nuts with copyright claiming reviewers.

This is just a great illustration of a misguided way to defend someone. It's both irrelevant - like a drunk driver who defends himself at trial by saying "everybody does it! if you don't prosecute all of them too it's unfair to prosecute me!" - and wrong even on its own terms: you state that these companies "used" to do the thing GW is doing now, by definition implying they no longer do so.

Some things can't be defended, and all attempting it does is void one's own credibility. GW's action on Midwinter's video is one of these times. It is clearly a review, and the amount of content he shows is clearly for the purpose of reviewing it. There's no way GW's IP objection here would be upheld. But it doesn't need to be, because GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

"It's a review, therefore he can include any amount of copyrighted content he wants because it's for a review" is not how it works. A review can still be infringement.

You trying to claim that there's "no way" that when a 10 minute video includes a mix of random video footage of the app in use including showing copyrighted content such as rules, articles, white dwarf pages, parts of several animations, music and more beyond what is needed (as in, it's just shown for little reason beyond just a general theme of " it's part of warhammer+") that there's no chance at all that it could possibly be determined that it may feature too much of their copyrighted material without enough of a reason for all that (whether all that actually would count or not is besides the point as that could only be fully determined via things going further than this) and that instead GW demonetizing that video must be them knowingly trying to abuse IP law has to be the most absurd take of this whole thing I've seen.

"Including video footage of the thing you're reviewing in a review is bad and evil and GW is entirely in the right"

What?

Dude, can you read? Because like...it doesn't seem like you can.

Thats not what he said. Like, at all.

I mean GW is scummy but theres no need to exaggerate what they are doing to critizise them. This is like when people comes and calls intercessors monopose. It weakens their arguemnt when GW is doing enough badly designed monopose kits allready to call out the ones that aren't.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:


"It's a review, therefore he can include any amount of copyrighted content he wants because it's for a review"

Is not what I wrote. If you insist on wasting everyone's time with egregious straw men, please at least have the decency not to put quotation marks around them.

Did you even watch the video we're talking about? You're just making yourself look silly here. There is just no world in which that isn't fair use for purposes of review. If you actually disagree, feel free to give some time stamps for where you think there's an argument that the displayed copyrighted material wouldn't be covered by the fair use exception for reviewing a product.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
If you're gonna take down GW for being too reporty about Youtube videos, take down Sony and Disney while you're at it. They used to go nuts with copyright claiming reviewers.

This is just a great illustration of a misguided way to defend someone. It's both irrelevant - like a drunk driver who defends himself at trial by saying "everybody does it! if you don't prosecute all of them too it's unfair to prosecute me!" - and wrong even on its own terms: you state that these companies "used" to do the thing GW is doing now, by definition implying they no longer do so.

Some things can't be defended, and all attempting it does is void one's own credibility. GW's action on Midwinter's video is one of these times. It is clearly a review, and the amount of content he shows is clearly for the purpose of reviewing it. There's no way GW's IP objection here would be upheld. But it doesn't need to be, because GW knows it can make the objection in bad faith and still achieve its objective even if it is ultimately overturned. It's the definition of abuse of the legal process.

"It's a review, therefore he can include any amount of copyrighted content he wants because it's for a review" is not how it works. A review can still be infringement.

You trying to claim that there's "no way" that when a 10 minute video includes a mix of random video footage of the app in use including showing copyrighted content such as rules, articles, white dwarf pages, parts of several animations, music and more beyond what is needed (as in, it's just shown for little reason beyond just a general theme of " it's part of warhammer+") that there's no chance at all that it could possibly be determined that it may feature too much of their copyrighted material without enough of a reason for all that (whether all that actually would count or not is besides the point as that could only be fully determined via things going further than this) and that instead GW demonetizing that video must be them knowingly trying to abuse IP law has to be the most absurd take of this whole thing I've seen.

"Including video footage of the thing you're reviewing in a review is bad and evil and GW is entirely in the right"

What?

Not what was said at all, don't misrepresent what I wrote. Re-read it and you'll see the parts about the amount of stuff included being an important factor, that's part of what determines fair dealing. Also you'll notice i didn't say whether GW was actually right or wrong in itself here, but just that it's possible they could be and it's not something so clearly "They're wrong with absolutely no chance they're right" like was claimed.

Here's the quote on fair dealing from the UK Gov site for you:

Fair dealing

Certain exceptions only apply if the use of the work is a ‘fair dealing’. For example, the exceptions relating to research and private study, criticism or review, or news reporting.

‘Fair dealing’ is a legal term used to establish whether a use of copyright material is lawful or whether it infringes copyright. There is no statutory definition of fair dealing - it will always be a matter of fact, degree and impression in each case. The question to be asked is: how would a fair-minded and honest person have dealt with the work?

Factors that have been identified by the courts as relevant in determining whether a particular dealing with a work is fair include:

does using the work affect the market for the original work? If a use of a work acts as a substitute for it, causing the owner to lose revenue, then it is not likely to be fair

is the amount of the work taken reasonable and appropriate? Was it necessary to use the amount that was taken? Usually only part of a work may be used

The relative importance of any one factor will vary according to the case in hand and the type of dealing in question.

A review can still be infringement depending on the specifics of it.

If you watch that Midwinter video and conclude GW is rightfully quashing unauthorized use beyond what is appropriate for the fair use / fair dealings exceptions, you must have never seen a film critique before in your life.

The moral issue which upsets people here is not about denying GWs legal rights to protect its intellectual property using the minutiae of common law systems.

It is rather people's generally accurate perception that threats of litigation are used by larger entities to bully smaller ones in order to maintain a competitive edge in a commercial market.

I have no doubt that Midwinter's video did indeed breach some tedious infraction about the precise amount of IP allowed to be shown without a license blah blah. The technicality, again, is not the issue. The issue is that GW shouldn't have bullied Midwinter. It is bad press for GW generally (midwinter isn't costing them a dime over this) and it is also just a mean spirited thing to do generally.

TheGoodGerman wrote:

caladancid wrote:

TheGoodGerman wrote:

Mario wrote:

TheGoodGerman wrote:In that case he has nothing to fear and his objection will go through.

I think the video was demonetised. Meaning they get no money during that time from that video and by the time his objection goes through and it's reinstated the peak monetisation phase is gone. You don't get that back just because your video is monetised later on (for the little bit of a long tail that a video tends to have on average).

If somebody makes their money from these reviews and a company were to do that every time a somewhat critical review appears then that creates a chilling effect for the reviewer, even if things are technically corrected after a few weeks. That's is one of these "technically correct" statements that are, in practice, ignorant of the circumstances that cause the real damage.

OK, that makes sense, I didn‘t take that into account.

I guess this is one of the risks when a „content creator“ signs up to that giant company YouTube’s terms.

Maybe I am misreading what you wrote, or not interpreting it correctly, and if so I apologize up front.

Probably. Apology accepted.

But, are you still saying that we should hold GW accountable? It looks like, and again maybe I am imputing something to you that isn't true, you are bending over backwards to not have any blame on GW. If that is the case I am interested to know why? YouTube's policies, or any other policies, don't seem to matter if GW's behavior was better.

GW is to blame for its actions and I have called them stupid myself. They're just not this evil superorganization, but just a regular large-ish company that behaves mostly normal (and does dumb stuff occasionally, because people who work also make mistakes). From what I see their cultural problem could be that they are mostly immune against the consequences of their mistakes because their products sell like hot cake whatever they do - so they go from success to success and there is no incentive to question things.

Also I don't see much wrongdoing in the specific cases we're discussing here:

- They have a job advert for a junior role that happens to be in their IP protection team. Big deal. The uproar on this forum about it is out of proportion.

- They went after Midwinter because of this Warhammerplus review video. That is a stupid move and if they had watched the video, they should know there is nothing to win for them really. As „The Phazer" points out (with a citation wrongly attributed to me), it's likely that no human had actually reviewed the video before they "struck". This would be a plausible explanation, because their specialized IP law team likely isn't that stupid.

Midwinter Minis has said it was a 'manual' strike versus the ones done by a computer program.

But it didn't even do that. It breached nothing at all. There are no such precise technicalities when it comes to what is fair use/dealing and what isn't. The standard is what a reasonable person would have done. And I challenge you to find a single reasonable person in the world who viewed that video and thought "this guy is showing more of GW's IP than is reasonable in order to review it."

So they're not only bullying Midwinter for no good reason, they're not even doing it based on something that is even technically correct. It's a true abuse of the system.

The Midwinter Minis situation has two possible reasons:

1. It was a bot

Generally speaking, from everything I've seen with YouTube, bots more often that not tag videos as a breach due to the use of music more than anything else.

In Guy's video there is a specific section where he puts in part of the soundtrack to one of the Hammer & Bolter episodes, as he's responding to calls that GW ripped his own music off. He plays his own music, and then part of the music from H&B, acknowledges that they are similar, but then moves on.

If it was a bot, then my guess would be that it got tagged because of that part. I think this is by far the most likely reason.

2. It was a human being

Then that's someone not understanding what a review is, and using YouTube copyright strikes to silence reviews will earn you no friends and an even worse reputation than GW already has with the community right now. This would be very bad.

Unless something's changed in the past few hours, Guy hasn't said which of the above two types it was, so for now I'd say it's safer to assume it was a bot doing what YT bots always do: Claim things for stupid illogical reasons detached of any human interaction or reasoning.

If it was a bot, that's also an abuse of the legal process. It shouldn't be possible to report a violation without having an actual human attest that said violation occurred, so someone can at least in theory be held responsible for making a false complaint.

I do think you are right about the music being the likely reason for the strike. Ironically, if it was a bot, it was probably for playing his own music, which the bot then inaccurately thought was GW's music, because he doesn't actually play GW's music for long enough to trigger the normal bot strike criteria. Which would be hilarious, as it would actually perfectly illustrate the point: if even the bot can't tell the difference between the two compositions...

And they are still continuing to rake in cash hand over fist.

They're also looking for a Social Media Manager, maybe the previous one got fired for the Cursed City kerfuffle? I sure hope so.

https://jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-apply/social-media-manager

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The Midwinter Minis situation has two possible reasons:

1. It was a bot

Generally speaking, from everything I've seen with YouTube, bots more often that not tag videos as a breach due to the use of music more than anything else.

In Guy's video there is a specific section where he puts in part of the soundtrack to one of the Hammer & Bolter episodes, as he's responding to calls that GW ripped his own music off. He plays his own music, and then part of the music from H&B, acknowledges that they are similar, but then moves on.

If it was a bot, then my guess would be that it got tagged because of that part. I think this is by far the most likely reason.

Genuine question - how does a bot do this? Scan for any video mentioning Warhammer+ in the title and then use image recognition on every frame of the video to compare what's in the frame against the full library of Warhammer+ videos? Or is there some other method a bot would use to auto-flag video footage as opposed to something like music?

 phandaal wrote:

Genuine question - how does a bot do this?

My understanding is that they usually scan for sound. Apparently the YouTuber in question played part of the actual warhammer+ video which contained sound.

Anyone is free to correct me on this...

yukishiro1 wrote:
If it was a bot, that's also an abuse of the legal process. It shouldn't be possible to report a violation without having an actual human attest that said violation occurred, so someone can at least in theory be held responsible for making a false complaint.

I do think you are right about the music being the likely reason for the strike. Ironically, if it was a bot, it was probably for playing his own music, which the bot then inaccurately thought was GW's music, because he doesn't actually play GW's music for long enough to trigger the normal bot strike criteria. Which would be hilarious, as it would actually perfectly illustrate the point: if even the bot can't tell the difference between the two compositions...

This actually makes more sense than a bot flagging his Warhammer+ footage. And yeah, it would not be a good look for Games Workshop.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jojo_monkey_boy wrote:

 phandaal wrote:

Genuine question - how does a bot do this?

My understanding is that they usually scan for sound. Apparently the YouTuber in question played part of the actual warhammer+ video which contained sound.

Anyone is free to correct me on this...

Yeah sound would make more sense. I was thinking it had scanned his video for the footage.

 phandaal wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The Midwinter Minis situation has two possible reasons:

1. It was a bot

Generally speaking, from everything I've seen with YouTube, bots more often that not tag videos as a breach due to the use of music more than anything else.

In Guy's video there is a specific section where he puts in part of the soundtrack to one of the Hammer & Bolter episodes, as he's responding to calls that GW ripped his own music off. He plays his own music, and then part of the music from H&B, acknowledges that they are similar, but then moves on.

If it was a bot, then my guess would be that it got tagged because of that part. I think this is by far the most likely reason.

Genuine question - how does a bot do this? Scan for any video mentioning Warhammer+ in the title and then use image recognition on every frame of the video to compare what's in the frame against the full library of Warhammer+ videos? Or is there some other method a bot would use to auto-flag video footage as opposed to something like music?

Usually, this way:

https://www.internetandtechnologylaw.com/copyright-bots/

It usually depends on the datasources you set for the bot, and they can analyze audio, video and (of course) text.

yukishiro1 wrote:
If it was a bot, that's also an abuse of the legal process. It shouldn't be possible to report a violation without having an actual human attest that said violation occurred, so someone can at least in theory be held responsible for making a false complaint.

But that's not how YT works unfortunately. They're too busy trying to not be/appear evil as a company, so Google can't handle the literally millions of hours of footage on that site, so bots were created to do the job (poorly). Thus we get bots tagging things like this.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Ironically, if it was a bot, it was probably for playing his own music, which the bot then inaccurately thought was GW's music, because he doesn't actually play GW's music for long enough to trigger the normal bot strike criteria. Which would be hilarious, as it would actually perfectly illustrate the point: if even the bot can't tell the difference between the two compositions...

Getting copyright struck for his own music is actually not outside the realm of possibility.