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And we mean sue – this is no cease and desist letter, but a full blown lawsuit with summon to jury trial. This week, Games Workshop filed a lawsuit in Maryland District Court alleging use of protected copyright for profit (there are actually multiple, multiple causes of action, but they all revolve around this theme). The suit is over WarhammerAlliance.com, a site that Curse operates to support fans of the Warhammer Online MMO. To our knowledge, this is the first time that GW has actually filed a full lawsuit against a fan site (there have been plenty of legal notices but not a lot of actual suits). What makes this even more bizarre is that GW staffers have done interviews and worked on brand compliance for the site in the past! It’s unclear if this is the result of a previous C&D letter (which would be the path this type of situation normally takes), but the action will probably have a chilling effect on other fan support sites that don’t operate as non-profits (many of whom received C&Ds earlier this year).
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Curse.com is NOT a fan site. It is commercial.
Without question, Curse is a commercial venture. However, Warhammer Alliance is a site for fans, with content by fans and much of the administration performed by fans. I won’t say that the issue isn’t muddy, but this is definitely a fan site (what’s the fundamental difference between WA and something like Warseer)?
WA is a professionally made and maintained website. It’s covered in ads and promotes Curse.com, which has a premium subscription service.
I suppose you could still call it a fansite, but I wanted to make it clear that GW isn’t suing some poor teenage warhammer fans.
To be clear, I’m not defending GW or curse.com. I don’t know about the details of the case. According to the internet, GW is always wrong anyway, so I’ll just go with that ;)
This isn’t a fan site. Its a commercial endeavor run by people that run a separate commercial venture that sells content for WoW.
Not that I think this makes a difference or is the point. GW wants all their domains back and is moving to take them back.
Past communications with GW employees isn’t necessarily relevant without knowing what those discussions were about but it appears that they only resolved around the wording of a legal disclaimer. That doesn’t and wouldn’t cover any use of a GW trademark in the domain name.
GW Legal has a new council and she has been going to sites (fan or commercial) and getting them to stop using GW trademarks in their names and in their domains.
Nothing new here really except that in this case the water is muddied by the commercial nature of the site’s owners.
“Pot, this is Kettle, we need to talk about your skin tone…”
Games Workshop shamelessly pirated from Mike Moorcock’s copyright protected material for their own profit for the creation of Warhammer. I suppose they want to claim this under “fair use”… But this is the company who very nearly single handedly destroyed the tabletop RPG hobby in the UK by making and then breaking their legal obligations to half a dozen publishers.
Really, they don’t play nice. I for one wouldn’t give them the time of day.