>Sues a miniature company for making models of things that they themselves don't make
>Sues an author for a completely unrelated book that uses the generic term 'space marine'
>Sues passionate fans for making a fan movie that promotes their products
>Doesn't sue 9th Age despite being a carbon copy of their rules and a blatant rip off of their armies
What gives, Veeky Forums?
>Doesn't sue 9th Age despite being a carbon copy of their rules and a blatant rip off of their armies
>What gives, Veeky Forums?
Have you never been in a situation that was too good to be true and figured it must have been an obvious trap?
9th isn't making money as far as I know, it's not like they're selling their rulebooks and making their own GW copy models. But if they are getting profits for this then GW will definitely sue
GW seems slightly, and I stress slightly, less dickish since they got a new CEO to replace Kirby.
If previous dick levels were over 8,000%, they're now at 7,998%
You cannot sue a ruleset this is tired and old knowledge and anyone and everyone in industry will tell you that no designer will shere his unfinished game with you because of this. If your rules arent tottaly uniqe in some way (like using patened pice of equipment) they just cannot be sued
The 9th Age is not commercial, also some of the writers have a legal background and got advice on how to ensure this doesn't happen.
Why would they sue?
Right now, 9th Age only serves them by selling their models for them. They aren't competing because GW is no longer selling a competing ruleset.
If this were back in 8th and GW had WHFB army books to sell, then of course 9A would be thrown under the bus. But as it is, the only thing it might be sapping is AoS rulebook sales, but also gives a reason to buy all the old models cluttering up shelves.
And the miserable bitch that was head of legal has left. She was directly responsible for chapter house, blood bowl, fan movie, etc.
IP laws are like ballistic missiles. If you don't ever use them, they lose their psychological effectiveness. If 9th Age were stepping over the boundaries, you'd bet GW would sue. As it stands, 9th Age don't make profit (or use trademarked names).
Wasn't the fan movie more of a fault the shitty German IP laws that meant they simply couldn't allow Damnatus to be released without giving up to their rights to trademarks used in it, ie. 40k, whether the makers wanted it or not?
Was the bitch the one who made us lose our bet on Duke?
9th Age is literally who tier and a fucking joke
Yep. German IP law is fucking weird as hell.
I kinda wish GW would shut it down. The whole thing is just full of assholes who just shit over every game system that isn't theirs. HEY GUYS STOP HAVING FUN PLAYING FANTASY PLAY OUR GAME INSTEAD 9TH 9TH 9TH
>Copyright / trademark infringement
>Copyright / trademark infringement
>Copyright / trademark infringement
>Not a copyright or trademark infringement
fuck off you dense mong cunt
>stop liking what I don't like: The Post
All trademark law is like that, you need to defend them or you effectively forfeit them.
9th Age is non-profit and you can't copywrirght rules, thank God.
It will die sooner or later anyway = No new players and 9th Age is only played by longbeards.
why do you concider it a joke ?
T9A shills are literally stop liking what I don't like the group.
>AoS sucks and literally no one but 2 kids and a dog with a sigmarine tapped to its head play it, everyone is playing 9th though!
Jesus Christ this. I'm currently running a WHFB tournament, and every time I make a post about it, the shills come out saying "Make this a 9th Age event!!".
Look, I don't shit over your 9th tournaments by spamming that it should be a 8th event, so show the same courtesy. They'd be having tantrums if people kept telling them to play AoS, but telling everyone to play 9th is fine?
I'm actually so fucking disappointed it's as popular as it is. Iwas hoping with the amount of people who complain their asses off about everything GW does, Warhammer would finally be gone. It's not like it was ever that good a game either, it's just the most popular.
But apparently everyone would just rather eat familiar shit than try something new.
If you don't protect your IP, then you lose the rights to protect that IP in the future.
If you make money off someone elses product then you can be sued, if you produce something that doesnt make you money then you can't.
New CEO is a dead sound bloke, its more than likely he doesnt acttually want to dick all over 9th age. Having met him it wouldn't suprise me if he actually played it, he plays pretty much all of GW's games and a lot of other companies games.
Prove it.
I've heard people claim for years that there's some obscure UK law that says people can steal from you with impunity if you don't act a right cunt at all times - basically to defend people like Tom Kirby who act a right cunt at all times. There's a thing in The States called "due diligence" that covers this area for Yanks, but uses the subjective term "reasonable." The implication is that unreasonable reactions exist, so being a dick can be considered wasting the court's time - an eventuality lawyers call a Bad Thing.
What's the UK law say about this, precisely?
Not to mention 9th Age's story is even shittier than AoS. At least the Endhammer guys know how to write interesting fan fiction.
Yeah, fuck those people who invested thousands of for wanting to continue using their miniatures for a game they enjoy.
What utter cunts.
You forgot about that CaD they sent to Duke about Chapter Master.
its literally 8th with all their problems solved
thats because warhammer is the only game for medium and big fantasy battles, the rest of the market is skirmish shit
Less their fault and more british copyright law.
Basically, if you don't defend an intellectual property that you own ONCE then you lose the right to issue a claim on copyright
>what is KoW and dozens of defunct ir fanmade systens you can get for free
>implying skirmish isn't superior gamemode for 28mm anyway
see
...9th Age has a story? I thought the entire thing was to make more balanced rules that you can paste the original WHFB names onto and forget AoS ever happened. Fuck, the single main reason to remain with WHFB is the lore, why the hell would I need a fanfic for it.
>fanmade systems
oh, you mean like 9th?
>kow
oh, you mean not-warhammer made by a former warhammer rules designer?
They didn't even come up with space marines themselves.
>skirmish is superior gamemode
hahahaha go back to your infinishit elitefaggotry
Because they're faggots. It started with just changing names to make it possible to talk about the game without saying, "Tomb Kings" every sentence. Then they got it into their head that there needs to be canon, so they've been inventing things wholecloth. The world of 9th Age now has about as much resemblance to the Old World as any other grim fantasy kitchen sink universe does.
Different CEOs.
>Not a copyright infringement, they lost the case
>Not a copyright infringement, they lost the case
This is it right here. The problem with whfb dieing was no new generations of players. 9th age wishes to continue that tradition, and will ultimately lead to their obscurity.
AoS is at least simple and friendly for new players. KoW is too, although showing resemblance to rank and flank battles. I would recommend either of those games over 9th age to someone interested in knowing where to start for fantasy miniwargaming.
Even if 9th went commercial, you can't copyright game mechanics. The 9th team went to great lengths to use copyright compliant verbiage. Its chinese knockoff level stuff, and pretty tough to make a case against. Not saying GW couldn't, I mean Bethesda sued Mojang for using 'Scrolls', anything could happen.
Actually, what's going to kill 9th is because it's fan made.
When a game is made by a company, no matter how many employees, there's a limited number of people at the top who dictate which direction the game is going in. With 9th, because it's fan made, it's a large community deciding things. And like with any large group, people are going to disagree, different factions will arise and break off, and eventually the whole thing will fracture.
It's riding high at the minute, but it won't last.
Eh one thing 9th age has going is it's taking an OGL approach to fantasy wargaming. They are trying to support miniature from several 3rd party companies. So you have all these other companies producing minis and rules for 9th age.
The good thing about this is lots of variety for the players. But at the cost of what could possibly be several imbalances in the rules and stuff. Imagine your a minis maker that wants to sell your minis, so you make really good rules for them and undercost them.
It was mostly Duke, who needed to abandon the project for his own monetary and sanity needs. But the threat of a "loose lips sink ships" type situation was the last straw for him and he finally left the project behind for good.
To my knowledge, they first tried to avoid IP my genericizing the models, names, and symbols, but it wasn't the same. They eventually handed over the source code and all work done on it to a couple of new guys and they've been tinkering with it in their own circle ever since.
this is what fascists actually believe
Then how come franchises like Star Wars and the like have fan creations all the time that don't get shut down?
Not saying you're wrong, but I'm genuinely curious.
LucasFilm literally has a longstanding set of guidelines for fan projects. If you don't meet those guidelines, they will indeed shut you down.
Some large IPs have them. Star Trek recently updated their own and there was a huge shitstorm from the "fans" who felt that their "rights" to make whatever using characters and settings they don't own were being infringed. In fact basically nothing changed.
Nobody's stopping you play dress-up, but some people obviously want to monetize or take advantage.
Not true. You need to challenge someone you feel is infringing your trademarks (and copyrights, and IP) but you're not forfeiting just because you don't go to court. In most cases, just telling them that you have in fact got all the documents to prove ownership (and where to find publicly-retained copies, if necessary) is enough - after that point, if they still don't back down, it's either because you don't own what you think you own, or they're idiots.
You can't really reduce it even to that; law is the resolution of disputes, there's no good blanket description of what any section has to be or how it works.
Something like that, but you'd again likely find that it was the way in which they were releasing which was at fault.
Theft in UK law is officially taking something with intent to deprive.
therefore:
>was what is alleged to have been taken, taken
>was it the property of the party who claim it was taken from them
>was what was taken actually worth something to the owner
>was there intent to deprive the owner of that worth on the part of the accused
>was there a loss at all
and then you get into more complex stuff with esoteric things like stealing ideas and there are even more tests to apply to prove the argument one way or the other. Or neither. Sometimes it's neither.
Being a cunt doesn't work, though. If you act the cunt in a court you will get slapped for it by the bench. Be polite and professional.
>Star Trek.
>Basically nothing changed.
Except you couldn't hire actors who had been on the show to play their characters, and they set time limits for how long a fan project could go.
Which may not seem huge, but that's how Tuvok makes his meal ticket.
They still had to bring the case to protect their IP, afaik they even acknowledged as much regarding the Space Marine + German movie incident
Who cares? Games Workshop is making bank off of a shitty lore that literally steals from both tabletop and video games. They are a devilish company that choked out other great tabletop mini war games. 40k and fantasy both have terribly written lore.
Kings of War
Warthrone
Dragon Rampant
>What gives, Veeky Forums?
Copyright laws. If you don't defend your rights, they can lose them.
Don't forget Armies of Arcana and Runewars
Yeah, a childrens book that has the word space marine in the title is totally an infringement on the rights of Games Workshop
Don't know them, but thanks for the heads up
Not all IP law relates to copyright.
Doesn't matter. Fan movie was probably non profit as well.
US copywrite law requires the ip owner to agressively defend their copywrite. UK law is likely similar
Not actually. Because when they lost those cases it was because it was found that they didn't have the copyright in the first place.
The charterhouse thing was a massive fuckup on their part for not having even plans for the models. Could have been an easy win if they did.
The "space marine" thing was just a stupid lawsuit. They knew they didn't have exclusive rights to that term, so there was no point in trying to defend it except to try and bully people.
>Copyright laws. If you don't defend your rights, they can lose them.
That's trademarks, not copyrights. Two different things.
>Something like that, but you'd again likely find that it was the way in which they were releasing which was at fault.
Nah, the problem with Damnatus was specifically Germany's IP laws which mean that the creator of a work can never sell ALL of their rights to said work. They will always be entitled to having their name on it and retaining some portion of it's profits. Since GW couldn't entirely own Damnatus, they just shut the thing down instead of buying it out and releasing it, which they were actually in talks to do.
>>Doesn't sue 9th Age despite being a carbon copy of their rules and a blatant rip off of their armies
Copyright law. You can't copyright the actual rules of a game, only the present presentation of it.
Hence the umpteen jillion Monopoly clones that have appeared over the past 70 years.
Hence every d20 based RPG since 1976.
Hence almost every CCG having actual game mechanics that are copies of Magic.
Wasn't the reason that WHFB was Sigmared was because it was too hard and expensive for newbloods to get into?
If 9A is just continung on, it'll die sooner or later
AoS is definately a lot cheaper to get a decent force going
>Hence every d20 based RPG since 1976.
I thought the D20 system was open sourced?
Yes, but she could have offered them a nob-commercial license.
Not everywhere.
>Logic and reason
Things that GW is missing
Which video games?
It's not.
It's true that "rules of a game" can't be copyrighted.
That however has nothing do with being sued.
After all, you also "can't be sued" for making a sculpt of a miniature from designed from a non-visual description (transformative fair use), nor for using a generic term not in the same product category as where you've trademarked it, if you've trademarked it at all (the term 'space marine' has been used by science fiction authors for about 100 years, and been used by world-famous authors (Heninlen etc.) for about 70).
>I can sue anyone for anything
>I can sue you for letting your dog poop on my lawn.
>You don't have a dog? It doesn't matter; I don't have any lawn.
>GW are pricks
>news at 11
>>I can sue anyone for anything
>>I can sue you for letting your dog poop on my lawn.
>>You don't have a dog? It doesn't matter; I don't have any lawn.
Yeah but if you lose you can be made to bear the legal costs of the winner. Part of what got Chapterhouse pro bono counsel was that GW's case was awful.
GW does still sell the 8th ed armybook digitally.
Everytime I think about AoS I want to vomit.