Reply To: Article 11/13 for the EU and future of the site

[blinky465 17208xp 1]

@Robert – I’m not sure this applies; unless things have changed legally in the last few years, the content creator – i.e. the person taking the photo/shooting the video retains the copyright, not the person who created the game/minis. Many years ago, I wrote some software for tracking football scores. I approached every football team in the league and asked for permission to use their team colours as icons/logos. Some were very protective, as you can understand. But I was told (by the FA no less) that if I went to every ground and took photos of a player from every team, I could use the photo as a generic representation of a player from that team without requiring a licence. In the same way a newspaper can show photos of a player scoring a goal without having to pay image rights to Chelsea/Man City, whoever, because their team strip/logo appears in the photo.

I think the same rights would apply re: game playthroughs, photos of miniatures etc.

A few years back I also co-created some unique toys (which Mattel paid for us to fly to LA to demonstrate) and worked with a few people to have photos taken (to create what’s called a “sizzle” in the trade). As I didn’t specifically employ the person taking the photos, they retained all rights. What I didn’t realise what that, after the toy option was turned down by Mattel and I asked them to remove the photos they had taken from their online portfolio site (to retain the option to present to other toy companies in future) I had no legal discourse to require them to do so: they were the copyright holder of the images, even though the content within them was not theirs.

There’s a world of difference between infringing copyright and trademark, just as there is in informing through media and “passing off”.

It’s noticable that the most vocal opponents of Article 13 are the companies like Youtube and Facebook et al, who are most likely to bear the brunt of this kind of ruling. Personally, I don’t think memes are suddenly going to disappear overnight (I can’t decide if this is a good thing or not). I don’t see that BoW/OTT would be adversely affected by this ruling (though GW might try to get a bit “heavy” attempting to shut down sites that are critical of them, while carrying their imagery).