Well, strictly speaking while the idea of military warriors in space is old, the actual term "Space Marine" which on a lot of levels is fairly silly, hasn't been used. The groups you've mentioned are Colonial Marines, and The Mechanized Mobile Infantry.1337mokro said:
That's not to say that I disagree with you, but it's a little harder to dispute than your giving it credit for, and to be honest similar things have come up before. I seem to remember the term "Super Hero" for example was battled over at one point and wound up as a joint copyright held by DC and Marvel, what it's status is at the moment is unknown to me, but for quite a while it was noticible that the costumed adventurers of other companies had to be referred to as something else, which lead to some rather interesting labeling in indie titles.
What's generic to a fan and the populance at large and what should be specific to someone who poplarized a term (even if they did not create it) is debatable, and in a lot of cases these issues become a big deal specifically due to how things fall into common usage.
To be honest I think M.C.A. Hogarth is the victim of a battle that has been brewing for a while. In cases like this it's good legal strategy to go after people who can't defend themselves properly, to build up a bunch of precedent, before tackling someone who can effectively dispute you.
Warhammer 40k has become increasingly popular and slipped into the public conscieness in a big way, having become a sort of "go to" referance for this generation when talking about heavily militarized science fiction, far more than making referances to other sources like "Starship Troopers" even if they are older. Referring to something as being like a Space Marine, or a "Space Marine Type" typically invokes 40k imagery among fandom, whether anyone wants to deny it or not.
What's more we've already started to see satires on the entire thing appearing, that are going in directions Games Workshop doesn't nessicarly approve of. An example of which would be the video game "Bonecraft".
You might be sitting here going "well yeah Therumancer, but that's a Blizzard property they are satirizing, and actually proves how generic the entire thing is". The thing is though that Blizzard has special permission to use a lot of the material for Warcraft and Starcraft from Games Workshop. Way back in the day "Warcraft" (the original RTS) began life as an attempt to make a "Warhammer" video game, Games Workshop wound up turning it down, but told Blizzard that if they changed the name they could continue developing it on their own and publish it. As a result you wound up with a lot of elements, including the art style, and some core concepts, which were taken directly from Warhammer and used with permission. This continued with StarCraft. It's ironic because it can be argued that Blizzard wound up killing (or greatly hampering) Games Workshop's eventual video game ambitions accross the board, Blizzard also has't been shy about exploiting their earlier permissions as well despite the changes it includes. Of course this also feeds into the whole attitude that Games Workshop has established some rights here.
At the end of the day though I think the big issue though is that a lot of things have been making analogies to their work, even if indirectly. and some of those things like "Bonecraft" probably slot them off, even if it's at best a secondhand refernace through it's parody of another source.
When you get down to it, I'd imagine their major concern here is going to be the image of the guy in overly bulky armor and the vision of the *ahem* "Facist, Big Shoulderpad Future", the blocky/chunky look of a lot of the equipment and weapons, and similar things.
As I understand things Warhammer 40k itself was drawn from a lot of other sources in UK Science Fiction, especially when you look at 2100 AD titles like "Judge Dredd" and "Stronium Dogs", *BUT* apparently this was again done with permission (similar to Warhammer) and while I've never tracked down the rumors, apparently some of the original artists and creators for Warhammer and 40k worked on those sources as well.
Don't jump on me, since I know people love to get on whatever I say just because I say it, but this is my guess as to what it all comes down to. To be honest I'm surprised it hasn't been an issue before now.
I'll also say that precedents haven't exactly been good for creators nowadays. I personally think an earlier ruling against "White Wolf" over the "Underworld" movies was a travesty, and this is coming from someone who hates White Wolf. Not only from the perspective of imagery, but from almost literally ripping off a published story called "For Love Of Monsters" which objectively wasn't paticularly good, the movies being better than the story, but it was still their material.
The ironic thing about all of this is that White Wolf's "Vampire" stuff was a huge rip off of Anne Rice, but going back many years ago, it was a rip off done with permission FROM Anne Rice, which got a lot of attention on old RPG Echos (what people used back before the WWW was like it is now, a shared mail system between BBS systems distributing packets through hubs and such). Something that makes it kind of amusing when people fight about whether or not it was a rip off or not, because while it went in it's own directions, this was kind of acknowleged since virtually day #1. The thing is though that they had permission, and things like "Underworld" did not. I think this is increasingly becoming the gist of disputes, people using things without permission, in mediums where it used to be politic to ask, and trying to claim public domain of concepts without bothering to ask who got permission from who else, or claiming that simply due to popularity creators should lose their rights to concepts.
