A History of GW's Legal Journey

It should be no surprise the GW - a company almost 50 years old and the titan of its niche market - has been to court a few times in order to firmly establish its rights to its intellectual property and to its way of doing business. However, because it is the biggest gorilla in a very small room, whenever they flex their muscles, the landscape of the industry changes around them - and not always in the way that they hope or expect.  I take a trip through what I think are the most significant cases in GW's history - at least in terms of their significance to the modern hobby.  Some of my sources include:

http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2020/08/tolkien-enterprises-vs-tsr.html

https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161

https://casetext.com/case/games-workshop-ltd-v-beal

https://casetext.com/case/games-workshop-ltd-v-chapterhouse-studios-1

https://casetext.com/case/games-workshop-ltd-v-chapterhouse-studios-llc

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/trademark-bully-thwarted-spots-space-marine-back-online

https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/florida-mans-case-dismissed.html

https://www.fauxhammer.com/news/games-workshop-vs-cults-3d-the-3d-printing-war-heats-up/

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You guys get until Friday morning to watch this exclusively. I'll share it publicly and all over the social meeds on Friday.

This is a bit of an experiment: putting GW front and centre in the title of the video to see if it garners a bit more attention. I kind of tried to do that in the one about community volunteers, but I think enough people have never heard of the Outriders that this was a bit of a stretch.

I'm kind of expecting this more controversial topic to generate more interest.

On a related note, a lot of people have been very keen to tell me, after the Corvus Belli video, that "Corvus Belli doesn't need saving!" So I think a future video might well end up being "Why Corvus Belli DOES need saving!" - because I don't think many people in this hobby appreciate how incredibly tenuous the grip on existence is of pretty much every single company in miniatures wargaming EXCEPT Games Workshop.

But I think I'll resist poking the bear for the time being.

This most recent video was a bit of a journey for me. When I start my research I expected to do Chapterhouse Studio and Spots and Space Marine. I kind of stumbled into Tolkein Enterprises early in the process and thought it informed the CHS case enough to include it. I was legitimately surprised to find no evidence anywhere that GW or Blizzard ever had any legal beef - just bags of rumour and speculation from people with no insider information.

Meanwhile, the Beal case and the Moore case were completely new ground for me. The Moore case, in particular, is worth reading about because it was so "Florida Man"! Holy shit, the guy was all but tearing his clothes off in court and screaming that GW faked the moon landings. I think it was less a court case than it was a full-blown mental breakdown. But hey. Florida. Am I right?

All of that brought me to Cults. And at the outset, I really thought that it was a classic case of GW throwing their weight around but, the more I scratched at it, the more I thought "why is GW suing Cults, when - in the Beal case - they didn't sue eBay?" Then I thought about how the case with Spots the Space Marine started with Amazon rather than Maggie Hogarth and the dots started to line up.

Anyway, maybe I, too, have wandered down a dark path of conspiracy, but it makes sense to me. I'll look forward to hearing what you guys think.

I will, however, resist looking too carefully at what the bottom half of the Internet thinks about it.

P.S. Midnight Dark is coming on apace. Obviously I'll be focused on fulfilling the Kickstarter (yay!) for the next few days at least. But I've now added the new aircraft rules (less complicated!), the solo rules and a heap of new upgrades. Mechs have also got a lot more "mech-y", I think. Big hopes that you guys will love them. Mech-level patrons have about two weeks before you'll see the first alpha draft of the rules.