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Wayniac wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
It's coming out of the Southern District of Florida.

Seems like an odd place to file your suit, especially for a British company.

Chapterhouse lawsuit was filed in Texas, so it's not uncommon for them. Apparently they are going after 3d printers who offer services, for printing STLS that someone else got that happened to be one of those "cloned" GW ones (rather than distinct). Which is bs because the 3d printers aren't usually checking every STL to make sure it's legit; someone says "I need you to print this STL I bought" and that's that.

If you're going to bring suit in the USA, you have to file out of somewhere and Florida and Texas are known to have business-friendly judiciaries.

 Eilif wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
It's coming out of the Southern District of Florida.

Seems like an odd place to file your suit, especially for a British company.

Chapterhouse lawsuit was filed in Texas, so it's not uncommon for them. Apparently they are going after 3d printers who offer services, for printing STLS that someone else got that happened to be one of those "cloned" GW ones (rather than distinct). Which is bs because the 3d printers aren't usually checking every STL to make sure it's legit; someone says "I need you to print this STL I bought" and that's that.

If you're going to bring suit in the USA, you have to file out of somewhere and Florida and Texas are known to have business-friendly judiciaries.

Wasn't Chapterhouse based in Texas? I think I got parcels from them with that return address..

 porkuslime wrote:

 Eilif wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
It's coming out of the Southern District of Florida.

Seems like an odd place to file your suit, especially for a British company.

Chapterhouse lawsuit was filed in Texas, so it's not uncommon for them. .

If you're going to bring suit in the USA, you have to file out of somewhere and Florida and Texas are known to have business-friendly judiciaries.

Wasn't Chapterhouse based in Texas? I think I got parcels from them with that return address..

Possibly? I didn't follow the Chapterhouse saga too closely.

 Mr. Burning wrote:
GW HAS to protect its IP.
It has a legal obligation to do so.

This is why "IP" is a terrible blanket term.

Not a lawyer.

They're required to defend and enforce their trademarks, I believe.

Trademarks yes, but they are also wrapped up with the IP and Copyright plus they likely have requirements under their company rules and shareholders to also protect things.

Plus they've outside contracts with firms like Warner that also likely come with requirements too.

you have to defend your trademarks, if you don't you lose the claims on them

but you cannot lose your IP or lose claims if you don't enforce your rights

Indeed, but you might lose shareholders (major ones) or investors if they think that you're not taking proper steps to protect the brand they are investing into.

So whilst it might not be a legal requirement to keep your IP, there are other very good reasons to still take steps to protect it.

Plus the two can easily be wrapped up together such as models that are infringing on IP which are also using trademark names

 Overread wrote:
Indeed, but you might lose shareholders (major ones) or investors if they think that you're not taking proper steps to protect the brand they are investing into.

So whilst it might not be a legal requirement to keep your IP, there are other very good reasons to still take steps to protect it.

Plus the two can easily be wrapped up together such as models that are infringing on IP which are also using trademark names

I should have said Trademarks. My bad.

I assume that IP in GW’s case means products made and sold from works it has created or owns the rights to.

Legally. Plc in the UK have to make every effort to uphold the value of the business on behalf of shareholder/stakeholders.
Licensing has its own issues with regards to protection as well.

In the Battletech community we already have the first collateral victim. No Guts, No Galaxy has been hit by the lawsuit, because nobody before GW used the word warhammer ever.

M.

Edit: NG,NG sells a magnet with the word Warhammer on it, and wait for it, the image of the battletech Warhammer nothing to do with GW at all. WARHAMMER (all capitals) is a trademark registered by GW, but go tell the difference to the paralegal or even worse the AI used to look for posible culprits.

Might be interesting to see GW going against Microsoft over "Warhammer"

 insaniak wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
We all know only British garage firms like Heresy and Hasslefree are allowed to blatantly steal IP all over the place.

Not at all. Anyone can do what Heresy and Hasslefree do. Producing a figure that looks like a character from a tv show is not an infringement. Producing a figure that looks like a character and calling it that character's name is more problematic, as is producing figures that look like someone else's figures.

I'd like to be clear on this

Designing a character, say, The Predator, is not copyrightable and any British garage sculptor can legally sculpt a Predator and sell it as long as they call it Alien Hunter Man

But the second British garage sculptor to sculpt a Predator is breaking the law because the first British garage sculptor who sculpted a Predator now owns the shape of the Predator (but the person who designed the Predator and put it on film does not...?)

It's complicated. But has to do with the type of work involved.

The person who designed the Predator owns the copyright to the work they create, but there are limitations to how that can be applied. Someone else creating a movie featuring a character that looks like the Predator would probably be an infringement. Creating a sculpture that looks like a Predator, so long as you don't call it a Predator, is generally not an infringement, particularly if it is not a direct duplicate of the version from the movie. There is no doubt a much better way that someone with actually IP qualifications could explain it, but in very simplistic terms, copying the visual characteristics of a character in a different medium is not the same as creating a copy in the same medium.

This was one of the things GW got slapped down on in the Chapterhouse case, as they tried to claim copyright on 3rd party miniatures based on artwork that they had never produced their own miniatures for, and were told it doesn't work that way. Which was the reason that GW's artwork all suddenly shifted to directly mirroring the models post-Chapterhouse. Making a model based on GW's artwork is not an infringement. Making a model that looks like a GW model potentially is. So, if you only produce artwork that you have a corresponding model for, you shut the door for 3rd party sculpts.

Similarly, Heresy and Hasslefree producing models that look like TV characters is fine so long as they don't use those characters' actual names. If another company had a license to produce, say, a Scooby Do game and Hasslefree's models looked like theirs? Then there's a potential problem.

 Miguelsan wrote:
In the Battletech community we already have the first collateral victim. No Guts, No Galaxy has been hit by the lawsuit, because nobody before GW used the word warhammer ever.

M.

Edit: NG,NG sells a magnet with the word Warhammer on it, and wait for it, the image of the battletech Warhammer nothing to do with GW at all. WARHAMMER (all capitals) is a trademark registered by GW, but go tell the difference to the paralegal or even worse the AI used to look for posible culprits.

I think the mass AI generated IP lawsuits if you can simply name as many companies as you like are going to become a real problem.

Sounds like basically the same gak that's already been going on for years on Youtube, predatory firms just copyright claiming everything en masse and the onus is always on the video creator to prove they own everything in the video, otherwise all ad revenue goes to the one who issued the claim.

I've seen some of the people involved reach out for sympathy on Reddit and subsequently be torn apart as, unsurprisingly, there were multiple obvious infringements they're committing.

I've no doubt there are some innocents in the crossfire but I'd hope they're in the minority and GW do right by them, as I'd heard they had some money put aside for wrongful identification or something to the effect?

GW doesn't want to get into legal fights they can't win and certainly doesn't want to get into legal fights that they've no actual leg to stand on.

Also sometimes these mass-wipeouts aren't a case of the parent firm (GW) directly sending takedowns but a firm like GW telling a second firm (like Etsy) to "takedown everything that relates to us with X terms on it".

So stuff gets caught in the crossfire because its just a blanket shot at everything using certain terms or such rather than targeted. Then firms sort it out after

well, in this case GW hired a company to get this done in Florida as one of the few states were this is possible
that wasn't a case that GW wasn't aware of it they knew exactly what they wanted and were to get it

Dudeface wrote:
as I'd heard they had some money put aside for wrongful identification or something to the effect?

they have to, as that specific law requires to set a compensation aside for those who are hit by accident

 Overread wrote:
GW doesn't want to get into legal fights they can't win and certainly doesn't want to get into legal fights that they've no actual leg to stand on.

But they are perfectly fine with sending out letters that amount to precisely "Either spend thousands in legal fees to prove we have no leg to stand on or stop making your version of swole dudes with big pauldrons"

Aren't we largely talking about shops that explicitly use AI models to steal work from others be it GW or otherwise?

Hardly what I'd call "no leg to stand on".

No, we are talking about shops using the term "Warhammer", something GW has no copyright on, and even the trademark is limited to "WARHAMMER"

one of those shops used AI art selling under the Warhammer tag for quick money
another was selling add ons for Battletech models (which one of them being a Warhammer)

problem is that under this specific lawsuit are so many different shops/persons (280 are named in the lawsuit) that the <50 examples we know don't tell us enough to know how targeted this is (and there might be still people who don't know that they are sued or for what)

could also be that those that were rightfully caught are the exceptions

Your IP extends as far as you can push it. And that goes both ways.

Don’t defend it? You can lose it. And international jurisdictions can be weird and unusual.

Push your luck/claim/jurisdiction/whatever, and you may well be able to extend it.

You don’t have to like a given law. A given law might be an anus. But unfortunately this is just how the game is played.

you cannot lose an IP if you don't defend it, just a trademark
some countries don't even allow selling or transferring an IP because of that

and this lawsuit isn't about the IP, it is about trademark infringement
so for everyone using the original Warhammer 40k logo in their advertising, this is a legal claim from GW
for everyone who made Citadel paint holders it is not
as it is not for anyone who advertise their products as "compatible with Warhammer XY"

for those making 40k cosplay items, it is a grey area as there is not trademark violation for selling a live sized Space Marine helmet

and I don't know whatever Baron of Dice has done to get on that list

Fair enough on the IP/Trademark thing.

The rest though? Depends on a court’s decision or capitulation.

GW didn’t invent the relevant laws. They just play the game according to the rules.

 kodos wrote:

for everyone who made Citadel paint holders it is not
as it is not for anyone who advertise their products as "compatible with Warhammer XY"

Again, selling a 'Citadel paint holder' would be an infringement, because it potentially misleads people to think it's a GW produced product. Selling a paint holder that holds Citadel paints would not, assuming it doesn't copy someone else's design and is clear that it is not a licensed product.

and I don't know whatever Baron of Dice has done to get on that list

I would guess it's the collection of dice using 40k faction logos.

However when it comes to enforcement many places will now enforce on tags/description terms when doing a carpetbomb/blanket ban because some people will copy a GW model and then only list in the tags the copyright names.

So for that reason innocent "compatible with" creators who are totally legal - get hit. Because those who are not legitimate have been trying to hide the terms in the tags/descriptions instead of the title.

Yeah, tags add a layer of complication. Tagging a paint rack with 'Citadel' because it fits GW paints would still be potentially misleading. Tagging it as 'Citadel Compatible' would be clearer, but would probably still (rightly or wrongly) get caught up in the sort of keyword-based net this lawsuit is likely using.

 kodos wrote:
and I don't know whatever Baron of Dice has done to get on that list

Just a guess, but a quick glance at the 40k section on the website and I'm looking at straight up copies of the Slaanesh symbol, EC Legion badge, Ulthwe rune, and Iron Hands Avernii badge. So like, maybe it's the stolen assets?

 kodos wrote:


and I don't know whatever Baron of Dice has done to get on that list

Which kind of calls into question everything else you've written.

A quick glance at their sci-fi dice (a nice, generic, non-infringing term) shows literally dozens of sets of dice using trademarked faction symbols. Emperor's Children, Night Lords, Alpha Legion, Word Bearers, Thousand Sons, Death Guard, Blood Angels, Salamanders, Dark Angels, Black Templars, Space Wolves, Ultramarines, Sisters, Ad Mech...

It seems to be a textbook attempt to avoid listing actually trademarks in descriptions (Dark Prince, Diseased Dice, etc) while blatantly using trademarked symbols on the dice themselves, which is kind of telling in and of itself.

Eilif wrote:

 porkuslime wrote:


Wasn't Chapterhouse based in Texas? I think I got parcels from them with that return address..

Possibly? I didn't follow the Chapterhouse saga too closely.

Chapterhouse may have been based in Texas, but IIRC the court case was tried in Chicago.

Slipspace wrote:

 kodos wrote:


and I don't know whatever Baron of Dice has done to get on that list

Which kind of calls into question everything else you've written.

A quick glance at their sci-fi dice (a nice, generic, non-infringing term) shows literally dozens of sets of dice using trademarked faction symbols. Emperor's Children, Night Lords, Alpha Legion, Word Bearers, Thousand Sons, Death Guard, Blood Angels, Salamanders, Dark Angels, Black Templars, Space Wolves, Ultramarines, Sisters, Ad Mech...

It seems to be a textbook attempt to avoid listing actually trademarks in descriptions (Dark Prince, Diseased Dice, etc) while blatantly using trademarked symbols on the dice themselves, which is kind of telling in and of itself.

Does GW actually have those symbols trademarked? or are they just claiming they do like they claimed a bunch of crap in the Chapterhouse suit they had no ownership of but just tried to throw their muscle around.