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Reply To: GW Takes Ghamak To Court!

Home Forums News, Rumours & General Discussion GW Takes Ghamak To Court! Reply To: GW Takes Ghamak To Court!

#1946527
blinky465
17208xp
Cult of Games Member

@Redscope – I’m not entirely sure that his entire business model is “ripping off GW designs”.
In his early days, he was very, very close to doing exactly this.
And I think even he (and his band of collaborators) acknowledge this, when he talks about identifying about 30% of his catalogue. 1 in 3 is a lot. But it’s not his entire output for the last 5 years or so.

Looking through his entire back catalogue on MyMinifactory, it’s absolutely without doubt that his designs are heavily influenced by 40k

s_marine

But a heavily-armoured-futuristic-space-soldier is always going to look like a Space Marine.
There are skull motifs everywhere (which feature very heavily in GW minis) and oversized shoulder-pads and a big fist and a massive sword with a chainsaw on it…. it looks like and is heavily inspired by a Space Marine.

But it’s not a GW/40K Space Marine.

GW have, in recent years, gone out of their way to make their IP different enough from the sources that they initially ripped off (Orc/Orruks, Elves/Aelves anyone) and it’s only right that if they want to protect their IP, it needs to be unique and not a re-hash of someone else’s work, and different enough to be distinguishable. Which they’ve done.

But it looks like Ghamak has done the same – his Space Marines don’t have blood-drops-with-wings on them, or eagles on the chests or fists-in-a-circle embossed onto the shoulder pads. The initial influence is still clearly visible – in the same way nobody can deny that Space Marines and Genestealers are basically just board game variants of the file Alien/s.

How close to the original influence do you need to get before you’re “passing off” ?
In some of his early designs, I agree that Ghamak was literally re-creating GW designs and selling them as alternative poses for GW miniatures. But I don’t think that’s the case any more.
And for those items that do infringe on someone else’s IP, he should remove them from his catalogue (which he has offered to do). The big problem with this particular lawsuit is that GW has insisted that he just shuts up shop and removes everything he (and his collaborators) have ever created because it’s “unfair competition”.

And that’s not right.

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