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..
At least Warhammer 40K is their actual product. As comments in TFA and here indicate the expression has been in scifi since 1932: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_marine
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..