The particular lawsuit can be found here.
The long story short is that GW shot a copyright infringement complaint to Blogger for posting the High Elf photos & info from this month's White Dwarf prior to its release under DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Not sure how BOLS was affected.
While I can understand GW's call on this, I don't think it's the best call. For some time now, GW has locked down information of their upcoming releases. This extends to their retailers as well as their fanbase. My local game store owner doesn't find out about new GW releases until the White Dwarf release, which means he's always a step behind when it comes to ordering new swag. I imagine this is one of the reasons for the massive Tau bottleneck everyone experienced earlier this month.
Naftka, and many other blogs filled this information void with the news and rumors that GW's holding back. It's kind of a niche, but there was clearly a big interest considering how popular the sites were/are. In my opinion they were just free advertizing for GW. Did they violate IP by publishing warhammer pictures? possibly. Did GW gain more from the rumor sites than it lost? Almost certainly.
I'm not a lawyer, and know very little about actual copyright law, but as a journalist (newspaper, not just blogs) I know a thing or two about having my IP stolen. I hate the idea of anyone taking the work I created, but I make exceptions for those who give me proper citation. I try not to post anything here without citing the origin and the place I found them. In my uninformed opinion I'm just reporting and reviewing what I see online.
That probably wouldn't protect me from GW if they wanted to ding me.
In the meantime I hope Naftka and BOLS will come back soon. The internet is far too quiet without them.
~Muninn
Yea I would think Gw would b happy with this because it exactly makes people save up for the release but then again Gw wants us to buy old stuff while the new stuff comes out a month later...
ReplyDeleteThe only way around this is just to say what's coming out without photo leaks... It sucks but I def want to see natfeit back online cus he does battle reports with Dark Eldar (which is my main army for two years now) ad he brings other tabletop games in which I would never have heard of or even invested time to play
Maybe as an Engineer I simply do not understand "marketing", but since GW does not do much (any) on their own they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot here... Shame, but I guess this is going to provide competing games a chance to catch up in the market...
ReplyDeleteI believe it's called: "I'll hurt me and then you'll be sorry". To be fair GW stole it from pych patients, but they are too crazy and disorganized to sue for copy write infringement ;)
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