Infringement of Games Workshop Limited's Intellectual Property Rights

Games Workshop Limited has for some time been engaged in the business of designing, manufacturing and marketing: hobby board games; war games; models; miniatures; and associated products and in the course of this business has acquired and registered a large number of copyrights and other intellectual property rights.

It has recently come to our attention that much of the information hosted on your website, www.fumbbl.com (the "Website"), provides us with cause for concern as it conflicts with our intellectual property rights. Although we are confident that the Website is a well-intentioned resource, we are acutely aware of the need to assert our intellectual property rights. Specifically, our causes for concern are that:

* the Website contains copies of Blood Bowl statistics and rules;
* tje Java Bowl programme contains various pieces of GW Blood Bowl art including the Blood Bowl pitch and Blood Bowl logo; and
* the Java Bowl programme uses all the Blood Bowl rules and statistics for each model.

As you may appreciate, GW has a strict policy of protecting all of its intellectual property rights. To this end, we must insist that these materials are removed from the Website.

By way of background to our concerns, copyright is a right that vests in the creator as soon as the material in question is created, in this case the Blood Bowl game. Therefore having created the game and accomapnying rules/statistics GW owns the copyright in them making it an offence for others to cause them, or products substantially based on them, to be published.

Similarly it is an offence to trade off registered trademarks belonging to others, in this case `Blood Bowl´. This is of particular concern to GW as fiven the content of your website, and the numerous and explicit references to Blood Bowl, there is a very real possibility that people could assume there to be some connection between your site and GW. Despite the presence of a modest disclaimer that GW is unable to accept as not only does it pose a financial risk, but there is the potential for harm to be caused to the GW brand.

It is the usual policy of GW to always enforce its rights against any party infringing its intellectual property rights by means of appropriate legal proceedings. However in the present circumstances we will be willing to refrain from such action should you agree to remove the aforementioned items from the Website.

Therefore, we would be grateful if within fourteen days of the date of this letter you would procide written undertakings, in a form acceptable to us, that you:

1. have received and understood the contents of this letter:
2. will cease and desist from any activities which infringes GW's intellectual property rights;
3. remove the Java Bowl link, and any materials subject to GW's copyright, from your site; and
4. confirm by return that you will not infringe GW's intellectual property rights at any time in the future.

If you are in any doubt as to the contents of this letter we suggest that you seek independant legal advice, or alternatively should you need clarification as to what you can and cannot do with GW's intellectual policy we refer you to out Intellectual Property Policy (http://legal.games-workshop.com).

We duly look forward to your anticipated compliance without recourse to more formal methods of enforcement.


Yours faithfully

Games Workshop

What arguement do they have though when you can stick a link to the free online stats on their site?

Well, the "licensing agreement" that is "accepted" to view the document can be seen as questionable.

Also, they could take down the documents, but that doesn't erase the fact that they were available. What's important, in that regard, is that the documents were ever made available freely.

All-in-all, it would not be cut and dried.

It would cost both sides enough money that neither would likely want to pursue it, though obviously GW's resources are vaster than the site owner.

Personally I'd just transfer the stuff to Niel in Bangladesh and send them an email saying get stuffed

Neal, what is your take on implementing the rules in a piece of software? Is that copyright infringement?

Also, what about using trademarks in a computer game? Let's say you created your own graphics and rules but used names like 'Blood Angel' or whatever?

However... one trick that seems to circumvent many challenges is to make a program itself programmable via a configuration or settings file. With the right settings, it can emulate a particular rules set.

Yes, Vassal would be a good example of this