Legality Questions - Army Builder vs. Emma's Power Cards

[Stormonu]

One rather salient point which I don't believe has been made (mea culpa if it has) is that in theory Army Builder allows the purchaser to make files for games which will allow him/her/it to build army lists, however in practice the majority (I wouldn't be surprised if it was 99%) of users do not make their own files, they simply download the pre-made fan ones that Lone Wolf kindly provides a link to on their site.

Now, I like Army Builder: I frequently use it to look up particular rules/stats when I don't want to dig out the relevant rulebook or buy the relevant rulebook, particularly in regards to Privateer Presses games as they are by far the most complete files linked to (in contrast Warhammer ones are full of instances of "see army book"). However I really do think a company which makes a fair bit of its money by stepping on other peoples IP shouldn't go round whining about its own ~ and that Lone Wolf rightly deserve a kick in the teeth for this bit of double standards.

The discussion in the "Lone Wolf vs. Privateer Press" got me thinking about the subject above. Forgive my ignorance, but didn't Emma's site get in trouble for providing (and selling) power cards with the exact text and stats from the game books? If so, wouldn't that put Lone Wolf (or other companies) in jeopardy for "aiding/abetting to a crime" by at least linking to files that possess stats from various game books for use with their product? If its not a problem, how are they able to legally do this (making the stat files free?)

I'm truly curious, as another program I have access to - Battle Planner, automatically downloads files for its program that contain stats for most miniature games, like Mechwarrior Dark Age, Herocliks and the like.

 

[S'mon]

Reproducing paragraphs of text written by someone else is copyright infringement. Data per se is not generally copyrightable but the sorting & arrangement of it can be.

Using a Trade Mark commercially - as an indicator of the origin of goods and services - can be infringement, and AIR WoTC accused Ema of doing this. Conversely talking about "Army Builders" on bulletin boards is not commercial use of the Mark and the Army Builder guy was completely wrong to claim it was.

I teach TM Law in the UK so the intricacies of the Lanham Act may be beyond me, but the basic structure of US TM law looks very similar to UK/EU law, maybe a bit more rightsholder-friendly.