In before trademark law =/= copyright law.
Darks63 said:
Does anyone know why GW is so sue happy all the time? Are they bored between codexes? greed? Chaos gods?
Trademarks are not copyrights. Trademarks have to be distinctive; they need to refer to a specific product made by a specific company. That's their whole reason for existing. In many jurisdictions you can lose the right to a registered trademark if the symbol (in this case, the term Space Marine) becomes
generic, which in this case means that it loses its capacity to refer to a specific product.
For example, the term aspirin was originally a registered trademark owned by Bayer. In 1919, it became genericised in several countries, because people conflated the word "aspirin" with any form of acetylsalicylic acid to the point where the word no longer referred specifically to Bayer's product. Now aspirin is a generic term for acetylsalicylic acid, and anyone can sell acetylsalicylic acid and call it aspirin.
The reason why Games Workshop seems so sue-happy is because, in order to retain their registered trademark, they
cannot let it become a generic science-fiction term. More specifically, they cannot let it be legally recognised as such. The reason why that's bad for GW is simple - if Space Marine became a generic term, anyone could release a miniatures range called "Space Marines" and leech off the reputation of GW's product, just like how they could release acetylsalicylic acid and call it aspirin. A
whole lot of money goes into establishing the reputation of a product. For GW, who retains its superiority in the marketplace solely on the basis of its reputation rather than the quality of its models (there are better model ranges offered by smaller competitors) this is a huge deal. If they lose that reputation, they potentially lose their marketplace dominance.
That's why the latest 40k game was called Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The addition of the distinctive element "Warhammer 40,000" ensures that the game's title, which is a trademark, is not struck out for being insufficiently distinctive. Meanwhile, the inclusion of the element "Space Marine" ensures that anyone else who releases a game - or in this case a book - called "Space Marine" can be sued on the basis that "Space Marine" is deceptively similar to "Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine."
The real kicker is that if GW sits by and does nothing, and lets people start or continue using Space Marine as a generic term, they're facilitating the genericisation of that term and undermining the value of their registered trademark. For GW's legal department, that's
unethical - they have to throw out these semi-baseless litigation threats from time to time, or they're not doing their jobs. They don't actually intend to sue; they just want to deter people from using the term Space Marine in any field (toys, games, films, books) that GW could have a business interest in, because if they allowed it, a future competitor could use that as grounds for having their trademark struck from the registry.
I hope that helps anyone here who's wondering why GW (and other companies like Bethesda) do this kind of seemingly inane shit from time to time. They actually have a pretty good reason for doing so.
