Over the last few months the blogosphere has gone pretty quiet over the ongoing legal wrangling between Games Workshop and ChapterHouse Studios. For those of you not familiar with the case, ChapterHouse runs an online store that sells upgrade kits and models based on GW products - Chapter specific upgrades, models, and options that GW has left out of its production run. This has become increasingly common with the proliferation of online retailers - just take a look in the blog roll at Tabletop Fix. However, ChapterHouse was particularly blatant with its creation, and earned the attention of GW's legal department. What follows is a quick recap of the case so far.
First, a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, do not have any particular familiarity with the bodies of law discussed below, and nothing said here is intended as or should be taken to be legal advice. Nor do I have any inside information or contact with any of the involved parties; the followed is gleaned from publicly available documents.
To begin with, Games Workshop is not screwing around. Its initial complaint, filed just before Christmas 2010, seeks to destroy ChapterHouse as a business entity, demanding treble damages, disgorgement of profits, and the destruction of all offending models and molds. The complaint itself runs to over 100 paragraphs. Although filed in federal district court, most of the damages seem to based on Illinois statutes. A surprisingly large number of its claims are based around alleged confusion surrounding the use of the Games Workshop trade name.
ChapterHouse is not making this easy. Although a relatively small business run out of the owner's home, it is being represented, apparently pro bono, by Winston & Strawn LLP. The last year has seen the two engaged in a legal knife fight over discovery and control of the controversy narrative. GW's attorneys at Folley and Lardner seem to be going for a broad approach to Warhammer IP and trying to establish GW ChapterHouse as a virtual per se infringer. It has made repeated requests for the specific GW products that its models were based on, requests which ChapterHouse has mostly ignored. GW has tried to use the lack of production to argue that its IP was the sole source of the models in question, without much success.
Meanwhile ChapterHouse has been attempting to undermine GW's damage claims and standing as copyright holder. It seems that GW has been lax in actually filing its copywritten material with U.S. authorities, and may have to actually prove that it employed the creators of individual models and works of fiction. This task is further complicated by the fact that most of its kits aren't direct copies of GW product. Essentially ChapterHouse has been demanding that GW produce documentation that it holds the rights to specific works rather than letting it stand as the owner of Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Forge World, and Black Library material.
The two parties spent most of 2011 trying to hash out the above points, apparently with great mutual frustration - ChapterHouse at one point moved for sanctions against GW for failure to comply with discovery orders, while GW has claimed numerous local rule and bad faith dealings on the part of ChapterHouse. In the interim, ChapterHouse has managed to get a temporary order shielding any of its sculptors from identification, presumably to prevent them from being named as parties prematurely, as Jon Paulson allegedly was.
For anyone hoping to a quick resolution of the case, don't hold your breath... a jury trial is slated to begin... in December 2012.
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