Simon Bradshaw

Well called!

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I think that if there was a legitimate reason to buy 3D printers then GW would be completely fucked. As it is most people are going to spend £1k on a printer that doesn't have any use except for printing figures.

Give it a couple of years for them to drop in price, and a killer app to appear, and then things will change.

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ffutures.livejournal.com

A fair number of schools already have them for Design and Technology - you have to wonder what the kiddies are running off when teacher isn't looking.

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We played quite large-scale Warhammer at school just by printing out lots of base-sized squares with 'SPACE MARINE' on them, on card acquired from the art department and using templates designed in !Draw on the Archimedes; the vital statistics are all in the big phone-directory rulebook, and the wargaming was surely the point of the thing.

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Aaah, that works - a bit like Gestetner machines in the olden days!

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Use your imagination... I can think of umpteen original things to print, and Thingiverse has thousands of non-copyright-infringing patterns.

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I have plenty of things that would be kinda cool to print, none of which are worth a thousand pound outlay for me.

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That's between you and your wallet, but just because you don't want to spend L1k on one doesn't mean they have no legitimate use except printing knock-offs! I suspect you are trying to say that if there were some popular application which meant that many people had a 3D printer for some other reason, then knock-off printing rates would soar. And yes, they probably would. But say that then, don't say something that amounts to "the only reason for wanting a 3D printer is criminal". There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting one, even if they're not economic right now - they're not economic for printing knock-offs either unless you want to go into business doing that.

(RepRap kits now down to L400, BTW; see e.g. http://reprappro.com/Huxley . Of course that's L400 plus a lot of time and effort...)

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By "legitimate" I didn't mean "legal", I mean "justified". As in "I can't justify it to myself, because there's nothing I'd use it for except farting around printing out awesome designs from the internet."

It's like having a printer - I have one because my fiancee is doing a PhD and needs to print off the occasional dead tree to scrawl all over, but otherwise I print off things so infrequently that I'd find it hard to justify it to myself as anything more than a toy.

Sorry for any confusion.

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Ah, worth the money, there I agree with you. Once they get cheap enough that you might have one anyway, I can see knock-offs becoming a real problem, not just as a headache for people who want to protect their copyright but also for people who want to buy things of a known minimum quality - see e.g. the explosion of awful print-on-demand books made from poorly-OCRed, unedited book scans. Not to mention the knots I can imagine copyright legislation tying itself in...

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Yup, once I can print out lampshades, light-switches, door-knobs, or other similar things around the house then I'll definitely be interested in getting one, and I'm sure that will come.

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ffutures.livejournal.com

Yep, it was pretty much inevitable that it would be GW, their emphasis on huge armies and large spiky things was bound to make them the number one target.

My guess is Star Fleet Battles miniatures next.

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beamjockey.livejournal.com

Can you dig up some public-domain game figures from a century ago?

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I don't think there'd be a problem in acquiring, scanning and uploading an actually-old lead soldier. Sadly, ebay search for '19th century lead soldiers' finds me lots and lots of lead soldiers of unknown date depicting Napoleonic-era French or unification-era Prussian infantrymen.

This isn't going to get you any tanks for another few years; though maybe some enthusiastic toymaker between 1903 and 1911 made a Land Ironclad.

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Were the takedowns against Thingiverse for Games Workshop's own designs, or just Warhammmer figure designs that had been created as new figures, in the style of Warhammer? What was the legal basis for either of these? (although DMCA doesn't really need much basis in anything).

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major-clanger.livejournal.com

I don't have those details, although as you say a DCMA takedown requires little in the way of evidence or formal process of law.

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If you search for 'warhammer' on Thingiverse now,

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5183

is the subject of a DMCA takedown.

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:18700 seems to be a repost of something which was also the subject of a DMCA takedown.

Those don't look like scans to me, I wonder whether the initial concern is the use of the (trademarked: see huge list of trademarks at http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?catId=&categoryId=§ion=&pIndex=6&aId=3900002&start=7&multiPageMode=true) names.

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hairyears.livejournal.com

Taking casts of Warhammer figurines has always been a low-level problem; the shops would ban you for life if they caught a the tell-tale midline casting 'seam' on.a Bloodbowl team...

The *next* problem is laser 3d scanning of the lead figurines, plus 3d printers. That's seamless, and the results would only be distinguishable from the low-cost plastic figurines by virtue of their better quality. After the firat coat of paint, it'd be indetectable.

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Err, that's presumably exactly what they've done in this case - I'd be much more alarmed if you could get a DMCA takedown for plastic-model-of-my-own-invention-labelled-ORK.

(I've done a little more artificial research substitute, the things which have been taken down were labelled with titles almost entirely made up of Games Workshop trademarks)

I'm not quite sure how good casual 3D scanning is nowadays; I have a feeling it's very good, because cellphones have nice bright screens right next to the camera so you can do very competent structured-illumination. Whilst the principal-components calculations for matching up chunks of point cloud are a bit fiddly, there appear to be decent GPL implementations, and you've got pretty decent six-axis positioning of the cellphone by accelerometer and gyroscope to start the computation from.

Edited Date: 2012-01-28 11:08 pm (UTC)

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I'd expect (although I'm not m'learned Clanger) that there's a more clear-cut case (ignoring the DMCA "proof by 800 pound gorilla" foolishness) against a regular sphere, labelled as "Warhammer 40000 sphere" than there is against a detailed "LandCruncher Tank" model that would (ahem) "look at home amongst ranks of Space Marines" but doesn't make any claims or use of the Warhammer names (and their presumably vastly revetted trademark rights).

Presumably this all ends up in a court case where teenage boys have to be recruited as expert witnesses to give opinions as to whether a particular model tank looks more like a Warhammer vehicle, Gundam something, Mother, or something from Starship Troopers. They they're asked to comment on whether any of the Starship Troopers films bear more relation to Heinlein or to Firefly, and the courtroom implodes in an ontological paradox.

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major-clanger.livejournal.com

The first question to be dealt with will be whether the original items are protected by intellectual property rights, and if so which right applies.

For a 3D object, there are four forms of IP that might be relevant:

- Copyright, as a sculpture
- Copyright, as a work of artistic craftsmanship
- Registered design right
- Unregistered design right

I go into more detail in these in my paper, but in short I have little doubt that GW figures and models are at the minimum protected by unregistered design right. However, since it seems clear that one does not infringe UDR by replicating an item for personal use, this would not stop someone from using a 3D printer to replicate the items. Selling the results via eBay would be another matter, and there is the interesting question of whether making a 3D design file available would an unlawful act. As for registered designs, a search via UKIPO indicates that GW own three, but they are all for gaming equipment rather than W40K products. (Since it costs to register designs and there would be a plethora of items to register this doesn't suprise me.)

If the GW items are protected by copyright though, then there is no personal use exemption and any copying would be an infringement. So what category of copyright might apply? In Lucasfilm v Ainsworth Mr Justice Mann held that a WAC is what it says it is: an item of craftsmanship created with artistic purposes in mind. I do not think anyone could really suggest that a W40K figure or model had been created in such a manner, so we are left with the question of whether such items would be sculptures.

Here the case law is less clear. In Lucasfilm the judge held that an Imperial Stormtrooper helmet was not a sculpture because it had not been created with its aesthetic purpose in mind. It was a prop, and whilst it had doubtless been scultped so as to convey a particular impression, that was an aspect of it being a prop, not the reason for which it had been created. In a similar vein, he held that toy stormtroopers had been created for the purposes of play, not for artistic admiration.

However, we have to take this alongside the 1902 case of Britain v Hanks, in which it was held that toy soldiers - which sound, by description, awfully like wargaming miniatures - were, under the law as it pertained at the time, just within the definition of a sculpture. This was noted and accepted by Mann J, and not quibbled with by the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court, so Lucasfilm does not overrule it. I can thus see that wargaming figures could be argued to be sculptures to a greater extent than figures which are sold as play toys. As you say, any dispute on this could well end up with expert witness evidence!

Mind you, there's another point. If the space marines existed as 2D artwork before GW ever made figurines of them then it may well be that any new 3D copy is an infringement in the original artistic copyright (as per a case about Popeye models infringing the copyright in the original cartoons.) To make matters even more complex though, where an artwork has been mass-produced by applying it in to a product (i.e. not just as a print or illustration) then its copyright is cut to 25 years. When did illustrations of space marines first appear in GW's publications?

If this point ever did come to court, it could raise a whole slew of interesting issues; even after several years of litigation reaching the Supreme Court, Lucasfilm v Ainsworth is not necessarily the last word on the issue! Of course, I rather doubt that anyone making 3D copies of GW space marines is in a position to fight a major lawsuit; what was unusual in Lucasfilm was that Mr Ainsworth had made enough money from selling Stormtrooper armour sets to fight the case all the way.

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My point - and why this could be significantly different from the Star Wars case - is that a Stromtrooper has to look very much like a Stormtrooper, but a gaming miniature can either be a copy (to varying degrees), or it can just as well be an entirely novel "sculpture" (if that is what it is) with no dependency on Warhammer prior art, other than to be capable of being played within the same games (which I would hazard falls under the same ancient Treaty of Rome trade freedoms as OEM vs. pattern car parts).

GW's medium-term commercial goal here is to avoid the market for their own WH miniatures being reduced. I can see many ways in which they can crack down on "piracy" whether of the IP embodied in their designs, or in their trademarks. However I can also see just as many ways to make playable figures that have no infringement of either. So how does GW preserve its market, when anyone with a moderate amount of design time and printer access can make their own without needing to infringe?

It would indeed seem that in the long-term, GW et al have to look at being designers more than casters, and to find a business model that can survive whilst licensing designs for home printing, not merely relying on the profit from the hardware delivery side.

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