Re: Chapterhouse vs. GW studios - Summary Judgement called
Originally Posted by grimnar1031
Just to be on track again, wasn’t the court case about intellectual property (IP) why couldn’t chapterhouse studios be like so many other companies out there and create their own IP or game system? - Their kickstarter seems to exist because GW have not yet produced a species version model for their own rules.
Just because a company has not yet produced a model that they have created rules and imagery for should they be penalised?
If wizards of the coast found another company producing magic the gathering cards for a world that wizards had not yet gotten to would they not protect their IP?
Does the Tolkien society not protect their fathers works and the worlds he created? Has anyone else produced works based in middle earth without their permission?
The Douglas Adams estate asked Eoin Colfer to write the 6th hitchhikers book, he could not have done this without their permission even though Douglas Adams had not written that story.
Why is it so bad that any organisation, company or individual shouldn’t protect their own possible future earnings?
The downside to this is now apparent in the current books from GW – e.g. the Dark Eldar codex only contains 3 named characters, GW couldn’t or wouldn’t produce models for the missing named characters – thus having a effect (however slight) on the gaming community - if they don’t produce a current model they will not publish current rules for it.
Is this the right way for any company to have to work? Where is the future of this entire industry going if a company cannot either release information about future ideas and plans or sneek peeks to future products (GW released information about “Rogue Trader” in 1985 and the game was released in 1987)
Please reply to my opinions because this is the way I perceive this situation and my thought process may not have enought source content to be correct.
I appreciate your opinions, but you are correct in your presumption that they may not be based on an appropriate context.
Copyright law protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright expressly excludes ideas, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, discoveries, and anything with a functional purpose extrinsic to its aesthetic value from protection.
When you make a work of art, you only get to protect that which is original to your work of art. Every single bit of content or element that has ever existed, anywhere in the world, at any point in time, prior to the moment that your work was fixed in a tangible medium of expression does not belong to you. It either belongs to someone else or, most likely, is freely available for everyone in the world to use forever.
Copyright protects against copying, and is in this way inherently very limited. Copy...right: the right to prevent others from copying your original works. In fact, copyright law so expressly protects against copying that there can be no infringement of a copyrighted work unless the defendant had prior access to that work.
Think of it like a photocopy machine. If you don't have the original, you can't make a copy of it, right?
All of this means that similarity does not equal copyright infringement. There are a million and one reasons why two works of art can be similar, even incredibly similar, without one being an infringing copy of the other.
The broad purpose behind this is that no work of art is created in a vacuum, contrary to what Alan Merrett believes. Artists build on the works of other artists. Punk gives way to new wave which gets picked up and morphed into synthpop which develops into electropop, bitpop, bitcore, house, techno, etc. and so forth. Artists get inspired by the work of other artists. They take from other artists to create something unique to themselves, and in this way our culture advances and the arts flourish.
Copyright law must balance that need to promote free artistic expression with the economic interests of the individual artist, and does this by defining copyright protection in a narrow way that prevents someone from taking a copy of your artwork, reproducing that copy, and selling it themselves. Once you start expanding copyright protection beyond those narrow confines, you start allowing artists to monopolize concepts, ideas, and fundamental principles, and thus constrain the development of artistic works.
Let's take orcs as an example. Now, orcs have been around forever, right? Where did orcs come from? A cursory perusal of Wikipedia will tell you that the etymology of the word itself has very old roots. Tolkein's fantasy world, while a monumental work of Western literature, was not created in a vacuum. Tolkein took ideas and concepts from myth, tradition, and folklore and used them to create a unique fictional universe that he personally fixed in a tangible medium of expression as a discrete number of literary works and associated writings. Tolkein does't own the ideas or concepts embodied in those expressions, because if he did, it would have allowed him to monopolize cultural traditions that properly belong to humanity writ large. Other authors and artists built extensively on Tolkein's works to create a swath of insanely precious creative works that I daresay many of us hold terribly dear.
Would you be willing to say that Gary Gygax did not create his own unique works of art?
Specifically addressing the 'alien defense line' point that you raised. What are those products a copy of? Can you point to a specific work of art fixed in a tangible medium of expression? The idea of a defensive wall isn't new, by far. It is perfectly well true that Games Workshop created a system of rules to represent a barrier, which requires one to engage in a systematic process during game play. That's not protected by copyright. Games Workshop created an Imperial defensive line product with certain functional dimensions as dictated by the game system. That's not protected by copyright. Games Workshop has created lots of fictional races like the Tau and the Tyranids.
Now, although Alan Merrett testified under oath that all elements of the Tau race are unique, we all know that isn't true. The Tau were not created in an artistic vacuum. Neither were the Tyranids. And I daresay that one could make a salient point about the extent to which the Tau and the Tyranids were "inspired" by pre-existing works of art. Games Workshop has made lots and lots and lots of Tau and Tyranid-related works of art. And all of those works of art should be and deserve to be protected to the extent to which they are each, individually, unique from everything else in the world.
Has Games Workshop created a Tau defensive line work of art fixed in a tangible medium of expression? If not, how then is a Tau defensive line a work of art? What does it look like? How has it been expressed? What elements of it are unique? If the work of art doesn't exist, you simply can't protect it. And you can't protect the idea of making it. You can't protect the intention to make it. If you could, the world of artistic creation would collapse completely.
"Hey you there, I had the idea for that artwork you just made, so it belongs to me now, even though I didn't actually make it." How insane a world would that be? How would artists feel free to make any works of art if someone could walk up and claim ownership of it by fiat?
TLDR: Copyright law works in very specific ways for damn good reasons.
