Well, it's finally happened...

GW simply don't have copyright on a lot of things, like if someone was making 3d shoulderpads of bird heads or wolf heads that looked really similar to Raptors chapter or Space Wolf logos, it's not really enforceable if they use generic names.

They just bully smaller companies who can't afford the legal action.

>From who
From Herbert, Harrison, Highline, Lucas, Moorcock, Metzen

I feel like the more chapter symbols a seller has blatantly copypasted, the stronger the copyright claim becomes.

Like, make one set of shoulderpads with wolf heads on them that look a damn lot like Space Wolf stuff? No big deal.

Make the same thing for every faction in 40k and they look identical to the stuff produced by GW? Looking pretty sketchy.

I wouldn't have a problem if GW was selling any of this stuff, themselves, but they aren't; you'll maybe get the First Founding chapters because Horus Heresy and whatever successors Forge World's designers are particularly interested in, but what if you're more interested in Star Phantoms or Mantis Warriors than Red Scorpions or Astral Claws? Minotaurs got a set of shoulder pads plus two characters and a Dreadnought because someone in Nottingham actually collects Minotaurs, while most of the rest of the Badab War belligerents got bubkes. Something like four fifths of the chapter-specific stuff from never got released, if it was ever even in the pipe to begin with.

And that's not even touching on the more niche stuff like squad markings, combat and storm shields, etc., etc.

>Metzen
Every Blizzard IP is a GW ripoff. Like, blatantly.

>Metzen

>what Orruks are

This entirely. The product in is just asking for a takedown, it's way too blatant. Even if GW aren't making a product, if you use their designs (particularly things like unique chapter and unit markings like the guy in OP's post), then you're skating on very thin ice indeed. Just because Disney isn't making a lunchbox with the Star Wars rebel logo on it though they probably are, doesn't mean you can just go and start selling one. Lawyers send a C&D to shapeways complaining that suchandsuch are infringing their IP, shapeways won't bother going through in much detail, they'll just close the seller down.

Intellectual property isn't real.

>GW has to give everything retarded copyright names because of faggots like the OP image

I don't feel sorry for them at all

This. AoS is basically WoW with more clutter.

Don't bother, Veeky Forums is filled with mindless shills

Eh, give the faggot a moment of consideration. Metzen may have ripped off of GeeDubs in the past, but then GeeDubs went and ripped back off of the over-indulgent Warcrap aesthetic. A lot of the Age of Smegma era models look like direct copy-pasta from Warcraft art.

No they don't.

>GeeDubs went and ripped back off of the over-indulgent Warcrap aesthetic.

Warhammer has always been busier than Warcraft.

>A lot of the Age of Smegma era models look like direct copy-pasta from Warcraft art.

Post comparisons.

Everything is back up in his store. Maybe a Shapeways database glitch, and he jumped the gun blaming GW? No update to his Twitter feed.

> people defend GW now that they finally put the baseline effort into running a company in the age of online communication after a decade of failing even to do that

Yeah, they're allowed to do this stuff up to a point, but I think it displays a vulgarity on GW's part that it wants to supposedly propagate a community of creativity, but won't take the steps to doing so itself, and when someone else takes up the vacancy they act this way. They want a monopoly but don't want to put the work in. Baseline efforts for being a decent company don't count, either.

Maybe, just maybe, GW don't want people making profit off of their IP like leeches.

>An upside down omega is copyrighted
New GW guys

Yeah actually, symbols and logo's are always copyrighted.

You can't copyright generic symbols and images like an upside down omega or the romen numeral 3

Also check and self check

>copyrighting letters

>Metzen

Kek, sure thing, go tell that to an IP lawyer. You may not be able to claim universal ownership of something fairly generic, but if it comes to something specific like usage in a game of space battles or on a shoulder pad shaped to fit a specific line of miniatures, then of course it can be copyrighted.

Argue that GW is being heavy-handed by all means, you're probably right, but to argue that their intellectual property and trademarks are unenforcable is just foolish.

if you don't copy letter rights how are people supposed to understand them checkmate athiests

As long as they don't fuck with muh kromlech

>GW take down a Literally Who

so what lol

Sure you can. Back in the 1980's Manga Video copyrighted the word "Manga"

>Some blueprints will be illegal (e.g., DIY nuclear warhead) and of course will be readily available anyway from data smugglers and on the dark web. There might be illegal blueprints which on the surface look innocent, but combining part 23 of the dust precipitator plan with part 17 of the air conditioner plan creates a working submachine gun.
Maybe they could do stuff like this.

It's all just delaying the inevitable.

Soon the 3d printers will be in our homes.

GW has to give everything retarded copyright names because they managed to draw the ire of the Electronic Frontier Foundation with their stupid claim to own the phrase "Space Marine." The EFF exists almost solely to fight specious DMCA takedown orders and GW managed to come across as both ogrish and legally in the wrong, so their response was to start renaming everything so they COULD plausibly claim to own the names.

>literally has a section dubbed "warhammer 40k" with bits to purchase under said category
>everything in the catalogue is easily recognizable as being ripped from 40k
>people act surprised when they get takedown notices

Except they've had their asses handed to them repeatedly in several high profile (in the industry at least) court cases. So while they may not be unenforceable, they're not all that strong either.

kickstarter.com/projects/249504031/sparkmaker-the-most-affordable-desktop-sla-3d-prin

Even if this Kickstarter bombs, we're only about eighteen months from consumer-grade SLA printing at near to or equal fidelity with Shapeways'.

You really don't have a clue what you're talking about.

I find it quite sad, all the changes in names and that because of the Copyrighting and IP control GW has become really anal about. Astra Militarum and Drewkari my arse.

It's part of the reason Fantasy died for Age of Sigmarines, they wanted a "franchise" only they were making miniatures for because they're all goofy as fuck.

If GW wanted to, they could sell sprues of chapter pads for £6 and they'd absolutely kill this whole market. People are only making them because they aren't.

Come on now.

Don't blame GW, blame Third party companies coming in and muddling everything up.

>we're only about eighteen months from consumer-grade SLA printing at near to or equal fidelity with Shapeways'.
I can't count how many times something similar has been said.

>A lot of the Age of Smegma era models look like direct copy-pasta from Warcraft art.
translation:
>I have no idea what the aesthetics of either/both AoS or WoW look like

Don't blame third party companies, blame consumers and hobbyists

Retard

And I laugh harder every single time.

It's not real.

Don't blame consumers and hobbyists, blame GW.

The law treats it as a real thing.
The law is broken as shit and has forgotten its purpose though.

In a former job I spent a few days reading reports on 3D printing feasibility for some high-detail industrial parts.

Every report ended like: "in one or two years it will totally be feasible". First one had been written in the middle of the 90s.

...

IP laws are made so that researchers, designers and authors can live from what they create.

Aren't there Airbus and RAF Typhoons flying with 3D printed parts right now or something?

By the time it will totally be feasible Programmable Matter technology will be around the corner and everyone will forget about 3d printing..

You listen to a lot of idiots, then. The progression of consumer 3d printing has been proceeding more or less exactly on schedule for the last decade; ten years ago, we were ten years away; five years ago, we were five years away. Today, it is both widespread and competitively priced along the same lines as any other high-end stationary tool, like a table saw or planer-jointer.

But the majority of 3d printers up until this point have used the cheaper fused deposition modeling technology, which is only as detailed as the filament medium is fine. The next big leap will be making photopolymerization affordable, and that's what is about eighteen months out.

Screen cap this post: by 2019, you will be able to buy a highly accurate, reasonably priced SLA printer from Amazon and be able to print your own miniatures by the following weekend.

What's totally feasible in an industrial capacity and what's totally feasible for consumers are two very different things. I owned my first desktop computer in 1983, but they didn't become widespread until more than a decade later - and understandably so, in today's dollars that old IBM XT would have cost more than $12,500, American. It wasn't until the mid-90s when Gateway and the other bargain brands put a computer in every suburban home.

fuck shapeways people that don't let you download their .stls so you can print them yourself.

That was the original idea. However the flip side was that after a relatively short period the copywrite/patent enters public domain for all to use. After decades of coperate lobbying, products never enter public domain on a human life time span, and can be traded between coperations.

Law is broken as fuck. Not remorly the same law as it was in the 1900s.

Pretty sure one of the outcomes of Chapterhouse was that you absolutely can say "compatible with Games Workshop Space Marines" or whatever in your product description if you want. Same way any one of a thousand smartphone case producing companies can say "compatible with iphone69" or whatever.

You mean like Chapter House or Spots the Space Marine? I think you need to go back and take another look at the verdicts. GW lost on their claims to trademark things like the shape of their shoulder pads, the term 'space marine', or making parts which are stated to be 'compatible with Warhammer 40000 miniatures' but they won on all sorts of naming and trademark issues like distinctive chapter badges, precidely the kind of stuff that the monkey in was producing.

Yeah, it's not like GW has ever made money off someone else's IP.

You can already do so with a Wanhao Duplicator. You can get some great detail on those. It's a huge upgrade from my Lulzbot ad far as fine features go.

Damn, how the flippity fuck am I going to get Bluhd Raevehn shoulder transfers now? Ebay? Because FW doesn't make them anymore.

>non American company winning any case in the USA when the other side has loads of time to give money to judges reelection campaign

Chinacast. If GW doesn't let us by sort of knock offs, then we may as well go with full knock offs. CCON sells the old FW shoulder pads among others.

>IP laws are made so that researchers, designers and authors can live from what they create.

Which has been heavily corrupted into letting corporations profit from things for seven decades after the original creator's death. You know they've pushed the whole IP thing too far when songs from 70 years ago are not only still under protection but will remain protected for another 70 years after that (more if the original author is still alive today). To use Disney as an example, not only has Walt Disney dead for over half a century, but all his siblings and all his children are now dead, as well as all but one of his nieces and nephews, but the Disney company will still hold on to exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse for nearly twenty more years, expiring at the end of 2036 (and this assumes that the Disney company won't push for an extension in the next two decades). At that point, the mouse will have existed for over a century, with anyone directly related to his creation long dead.

IP law needs to exist to encourage fresh creation by letting creators profit from their work, but we need to reign in the current system which goes well past that mandate.

If you can get in to the secret club...

The A350 xwb has some 3d printed pieces in non-critical locations.

>US law
My bad, here IP laws aren't that fucked.

Laws have always been in favor of the big guy. The issue is that these days instead of having to wait out your patent or copyright before they put their larger capital base to exploiting your work, they hire people and owns the rights to begin with, and don't want to ever lose those rights because a corporation is an effectivily immortal entity.

The thing is the system more or less works as a matter of protecting IPs from gross exploitation by smaller, lower quality producers who would love to rip everything off at the back end after production costs have all been payed on the front by someone else. The only real problem is that the law will always be relatively gray area around fair use because usage of an IP is fairly harmless right up until it isn't.

>My bad, here IP laws aren't that fucked.

As a small bit of hope, at least we're not China which basically has zero enforcement for IP protection. Both extreme ends of copyright protection are fucking stupid, but I guess it's better to be on the overprotective end than than the "let everyone just steal all the ideas" end.

>Drewkari

>sensiblechuckle.png

Too bad. Time to look for a real job.

I dont know why, but seeing drew Carey laugh makes me happy

Meanwhile, GW uses trademarks, which are something completely different from what you're typing about that works in different ways.

Trademarks are concept which would otherwise be generic but no one else is using + category which would otherwise be generic, intended as a consumer protection mechanism to make sure everyone gets what they think they're getting when they buy a product (including secondhand!) with a particular label on it.
It breaks down when a subset of people specifically want fakes, but can't really be allowed to have them because they're probably going to resell someday.
It also breaks down when GW ignores the "no one else is using" part and comes up with shit like "only we have space marines".

GW refusing to allow armies with third-party mods in sanctioned tournaments is its own thing that has nothing to do with IP laws at all.

>things you can say about Drew Carey but not your ex

Actually, copyright has its roots in protecting monopolistic privilege. It initially started as a license to produce books within a certain area. The very roots of the concept are rotten.

GW taking action against people releasing parts for their minis without permission is pretty understandable. They're running a business

It's not property theft.

People make kits and accessories to augment and convert models for decades. There's countless add on kits for Tamiya, Airfix, Revell, etc kits made by third parties. This is just part of modelling.

Yeah, its the theft of intellectual property.

Its unfortunate that Games Workshop is so shitty about things like recasters for stuff they don't make anymore, but its an understandable decision for a business to take.

>GW owns the idea of hydras and skulls

shills gtfo

Copyright's original intent was to make it possible to write a book and sell it without being undercut by your neighbor. The nature of the written word is that it takes no effort at all to copy it, which means that if I write a 10,000 word novel and you wanna get paid for it you just have to copy the words.

It then got co-opted by assholes, like all the good things in this world.

>random company makes brass barrels for Tamiya Tiger IIs
No one bats an eye, the customer has a more realistic Tiger II, Tamiya sold a kit and the small company sold its aftermarket kit as well. Everyone profits and is happy

>random guy 3prints a pauldron you have to use with a GW miniature
That's immoral and the guy should be thrown into a jail. Also, the miniature is now called Space MarYne^tm because fuck you

Why is GW retarded? If they didn't want people printing space marines pauldrons they should have made those available in the first place

I think a better solution would have been for GW to take a step back and contemplate, "is this good for the hobby?" before throwing their weight around. There is undoubtedly a case to be made that they're entirely within their rights to demand that the infringing products be removed, especially since they need to aggressively fight about dilution of their IP or risk losing it entirely.

But the simple fact of the matter is that ninety percent of these products, GW doesn't make and they aren't planning to make them even after getting them pulled from Shapeways. That's bad for the hobby.

Maybe a better solution would have been too make Matt an offer he can't refuse - "you can continue to design and sell Space Marine shoulders under license and remit xx% of the proceeds in order to make it official, otherwise we'll shut you down."

GW gets what they want; their copyright is preserved and, further, memorialized in a formal licensing agreement.

Matt gets what he wants; he continues to sell Space Marine bits for a modest profit, maybe a little bit more modest than before.

Shapeways gets what they want; they continue to collect the lion's share of revenue for the use of their manufacturing-on-demand facilities.

And we, the hobbyists, get what we want; a dynamic, responsive solution to the gaping hole in GW's range of Space Marine accessories.

But, if course, GW had to throw their weight around because they think they're legally right and fuck the optics of it, which is precisely the kind of thinking that hot them in trouble over a Spots the Space Marine.

Well, the people working on Sigmar don't have a clue what the aesthetics of Sigmar are supposed to be either, and are completely incapable of communicating the aesthetics or lore of the setting to anyone else, so it all works out.

>aesthetic
>lore
>setting

>Age of Sigmar

>Maybe a better solution would have been too make Matt an offer he can't refuse - "you can continue to design and sell Space Marine shoulders under license and remit xx% of the proceeds in order to make it official, otherwise we'll shut you down."
Effectively rewarding the guy who made a profit off of exploiting their IP.

>Shapeways gets what they want; they continue to collect the lion's share of revenue for the use of their manufacturing-on-demand facilities.
And letting most of the profits end up with the company that enabled him.

This may be a bit of a hard sell in Nottingham.

>exploiting their IP.
>this cell phone case is "exploiting Apple's IP" guys!

Why are third party accessories some kind of taboo for minis when it's perfectly fucking normal for all other goods?

Shills gtfo

GW minis. Third party accessories are perfectly normal for basically everyone else

The alternative – and what GW has clearly chosen – is to cut off their nose to spite their face. The whole marketing blitz behind the "new" Games Workshop is predicated on the notion that their executive leadership is less petty and deranged than the old one, and for the most part they've been doing a good job of it. Backing off of their long-standing "no shopping cart" policy for web-based trade sales customers is, itself, a similar sort of reward for those vendors - Warstore - that went out of their way to circumvent the policy on order to sell online.

If the difference is making some money and making no money, it shouldn't be as hard a sell as you seem to believe. Instead, we got the sort of reflexive "shut it down" reaction that keeps blowing back on Games Workshop, either due to direct backlash from their customers or the actual, literal dilution of they trademarks when they eventually find their way before a judge.