Or at least they well if their legal team as anything to say about it. I was alerted to this by my blog roll this morning from Greyhawk Grognard, GG is an RPG blog so I wanted to point this out to miniatures hobbyists who dont have any cross reference.
In the future, All Space Marines will be Warhammer 40K Space Marines. Is a blog post by writer M.C.A Hogarth who recently had his novel "Spots the Space Marine" pulled from Amazon for trademark infringement. Really GW?? you own the term "Space Marine" a term being used in Science Fiction from as far back as the 1930's?. I'll save you treatise on it's literary use and needless to say the genre of "Science Fiction" owns this term. While true that if you play with toy soldiers and you hear the term Space Marine surely images of big blue robot like guys flying in space churches, fighting with chainsaws comes to mind, but when some one who has never heard of Games Workshop, (and yes there are many believe it or not) hears the term "Space Marine", they go uhhh.."Starship Troopers?, "The bad guys in Star Wars? let alone if you have any sort of literary Science Fiction pedigree. In short this is massive over reach by GW legal. We have seen this before.
Once again an example of financial intimidation. This is a legal tactic often practiced that forces you to court (most often far from where you live) even thou you'll most likely win but because you cant afford the legal fees, you lose. Games Workshop has nasty habit of this despicable practice, and as we all know has a history of suing its fans, or anyone else in a gigantic net they throw out to look for IP infringement. something that wasn't lost on our friends at Battlefoam until they actually sued a guy that was a lawyer and could defend himself for free. This is not the case here, the author has no financial means to challenge this. It's been brought up in the comments this guy needs to crowd source fund his legal fees as this challenge will surely lose in court.
So whether you're a GW fan boy or not, whether you buy and like their products or not do think this is ok? Can GW work its way to eventually buying "Science Fiction" if you're like me and love Science Fiction buy don't find GW Sci Fi universe particularly enjoyable, you wont let this slip by as this is the slippery of slippery slopes..not defending this type of challenges only re-inforces future GW legal actions. How much would you kick in to help this guy defend this challenge in a crowd sourcing effort? with all the dough I've thrown at Kickstarter and Indiegogo in the last year for toys for myself, I being embarrassed at anything less than $50.00, you?
7 comments:
Hahaha. I'd totally crowd source a legal defense of this. It'd be nice if it created a precedent removing GW's right to space marine.
Reminds me of the recent bugaboo where it came to light that GW didn't own the rights to a good many of their early illustrations.....they had reverted to the artists.
Dave
I also think this is stupid as stupid.
But it is worth noting, that the American trademark/patent system is very very messed up.
There are entire companies that do NOTHING else but buy patents and sue people. They produce nothing, offer no services, just sue people.
Until the system is fixed, its not surprising that a company will use the broken part of it.
I came across this on another blog a little while ago, and it certainly sticks in the throat a bit...
I'd be up for it... I have had enough grief over IP infrigement etc over on "Hail Caesar Fantasy yahoo group" - which just about killed off the group, to offer something back to someone to fight the good fight...
http://www.ahschmidt.com/images/thePast.jpg
I heard that next they plan to sue anyone who uses the word "Games" and to be safe, the word "the". ;)
It's a her, a single mother no less!
Who sent some of her proceeds to a wounded soldier charity.
Good work GW...
You have a very weird love-hate relationship with GW.
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