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In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

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Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#81

Post by riazrizvi »

sxp wrote: post #74

Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the term "Space Marine" was in use for quite a while before W40K's 1987 release but there was a big increase after 1987. At a glance, the trend seems to be similar to trends for other related terms such as "powered armor" but doesn't match the trend for "Warhammer". http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=space+marine%2C...

Amazon itself sells a few books with the term. Why doesn't the author ask Amazon to take down the other non-Warhammer titles or reinstate his? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_9?rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3A%22s...

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#82

Post by homosaur »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #56

I wish there was a Kickstarter like non-profit organization whose focus was finding and defending worthy cases like this. People/organizations submit their situation and do the work of raising awareness and collecting pledges, the organization uses the money to oversee the actual legal case and pay the attorneys, ideally a network of folks who would be willing to consider defending said cases at a reduced or pro-bono…

The problem is that when you pay the legal fees for a party, you can be exposed to liability in certain cases. It's actually happened quite a few times.

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#83

Post by philwelch »

bostonpete wrote: post #66

I don't really have an opinion one way or another about this, but I wonder if there's the same sort of anger about the fact that Lucas has (and defends) a trademark on "droid".

Since the generic term is "robot" or "android", it seems valid to me.

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#84

Post by tristanperry »

This is unfortunate but not unexpected.

I used to run a fairly large 40K website (Tau Online, now defunct).

I'd regularly receive letters and e-mails from the Games Workshop legal team.

I remember one time, someone had made a simple post on our forums saying they were thinking of selling a short story they'd written based around the 40K World. He hadn't named the story. It wasn't for sale. He was just thinking out loud.

Anywhoo, the GW lawyers contacted me: they asked me to delete the whole thread, ban the user and provide them with the poster's IP address, name and contact information. Which, y'know, is a bit overkill. (And possibly not legal? We didn't have their name nor contact information, but I would have assumed I couldn't just hand this information out to any random lawyer).

As in this case, the Games Workshop legal team regularly throw around threats - often with no legal basis.

I hope the blog poster is able to garner enough support to move forward with this. Unfortunately I fear that GW's baseless threats will beat back hobbyists, yet again..

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#86

Post by csense »

dkhenry wrote: post #12
bunderbunder wrote: post #8

According to Wikipedia[1], the first use of the term 'space marine' in literature was the 1932 short story Captain Brink of the Space Marines by Bob Olsen. That's a full 43 years before Games Workshop was founded, and 55 years before Warhammer 40K was introduced. And the prior usage of the term and concept kept coming strong throughout the intervening half-century. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_marine

So why is this not an open and shut case ?

Because there's a nonzero risk the judge won't order Warhammer to pay the defendant's legal fees. Meaning that even if the author of the book "wins" in court, he might still lose a lot of money.

And if he doesn't have a corp or LLC set up to sell the book, or hasn't jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops involved correctly, there's a nonzero risk that the Warhammer people could get a multi-million dollar judgment on him and take his house, cars, kid's college fund and most of his future salary. (The fact that he says he's using the proceeds from the book to pay for his daughter's schooling actually implies he doesn't have one of these legal structures set up.)

That's how the US legal system works, unfortunately.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#88

Post by danielweber »

riazrizvi wrote: post #81
sxp wrote: post #74

Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the term "Space Marine" was in use for quite a while before W40K's 1987 release but there was a big increase after 1987. At a glance, the trend seems to be similar to trends for other related terms such as "powered armor" but doesn't match the trend for "Warhammer". http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=space+marine%2C...

Amazon itself sells a few books with the term. Why doesn't the author ask Amazon to take down the other non-Warhammer titles or reinstate his? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_9?rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3A%22s...

I only saw one entry on the first page of those results that had the term and wasn't a GW license.

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#89

Post by danielweber »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #56

I wish there was a Kickstarter like non-profit organization whose focus was finding and defending worthy cases like this. People/organizations submit their situation and do the work of raising awareness and collecting pledges, the organization uses the money to oversee the actual legal case and pay the attorneys, ideally a network of folks who would be willing to consider defending said cases at a reduced or pro-bono…

http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/06/the-popehat-signal-help-an...

Re: In the future, all space marines will be Warhammer 40K space marines

#90

Post by Argorak »

Legally, where does that leave StarCraft, especially the soon to be released Heart of the Swarm (all have units called Space Marines)?

If GW don't (and never did) enforce their trademark against Blizzard, do they have any say against a book author that wants to push the topic in front of a court?

AFAIK, Blizzard didn't license the term.

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