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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8899930" data-attributes="member: 18">The thing that's worth noting here is that this very much a double-edged sword. Both parties are at risk.A company who comes in claiming a huge number of things are copyright and/or trademark infringement (you'd be looking at both), is taking a big risk.Because it's almost certain that, if they claim a large number of things, they're going to be judged to be wrong on quite a lot of them. And a lot of companies (and apparently the lawyers they employ/hire) don't really realize this.A case I've mentioned a few times which is relevant is Games Workshop vs Chapter House Studios LLC. Chapter House (CHS) were a company which makes minis, mini bits, and so on. They were particularly offering a ton of mini parts to customize GW 40K models, as well as quite a number of straight-up alternative models for 40K vehicles, which you could clearly recognise as 40K vehicles.Games Workshop tried to body them by just dropping literally hundreds of copyright or trademark (which in the US very much includes "trade dress" i.e. stuff that looks like it's yours) infringement claims. Presumably they expected CHS to just buckle, but they didn't, even though they're tiny and GW are pretty huge. This was a US case (Illinois I believe).They did indeed go through every claim, and found in the vast majority of them (about 60-70%) that CHS was either not infringing, or arguably infringing but it was fair use (don't ask me about that subtle distinction but the end result is it's fine). I don't think there's a detailed list of what they won/lost on, but for example, GW were claiming that really big shoulderpads were basically part of the GW IP, and they lost on that, but GW won on for example, some kind of fancy Eldar Jetbike. Overall though, GW lost more than it won - a bunch of stuff it could previously have threatened people about with C&Ds and the like, it could no longer claim.That's actually quite a serious problem. You can't send out a proper C&D or DMCA if you KNOW you don't own that thing, the lawyer sending it will end getting in serious trouble with the bar if a complaint is made (which is not unlikely), even potentially disbarred if they had previous examples of doing it or it was egregious.So the end result for WotC in such a case could easily be that stuff they've long-regarded as being owned by them, IP-wise, suddenly becomes free for anyone to use.EDIT - Looks like Chapter House did shut down five or six years later, but if you want an example of the sort of stuff you can get away with thanks to their court case:[URL unfurl="true"]https://spikeybits.com/store/28mm-Sci-fi-Antigrav-Platform-Speeder-Dark-Age-Designs-p365047187[/URL]LEGALLY NOT A SPACE MARINE LAND SPEEDER lol.</blockquote>

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