piracy and warseer- a thread closed by stupidity

[General Biakal]

i wanted to make this comment on a thread on warseer aout recasts and genral piracy but as usual the fuck-witted mods shut it down before any decent arguments could be made. so i wanted my post (failed to post as the thread was blocked while writing) to be seen here, amoung people who are infact not fucking idiots.... mostly


there is a difference between a "mate" who casts the odd bit and you pay him enough for costs and sundries perhaps three times a year and an ebay pirate selling two or three a week for genuine profit.

one hurts FW, one dosent.

likewise if you make your own for your own use then thats fine too.

even worse is if you make your own that suck and you sel them on ebay...

what is inportnt tho is WE NEED THESE DISCUSSIONS about piracy. be it IP or pysical models. i disagree it damages warseer: i think it shows we CAN have mature arguments about the serious issues affecting our hobby. so many arguments get hi-jacked by idiots but so far this really has been a restrained discussion about something that affects most gamers.

i think even GW's lawyers respect the difference between a home made cast for hobby purposes and ones made for profit... we need to discuss this so younger gamers know WHY .pdf books are A produced (percieved cost?) and B why they harm the hobby (less income from sales so less money to develop new artwork and books). And younger gamers need to know that someone on ebay selling re-casts of questionable quality are harming the hobby and to leave well alone. I would support GW every day in going after ebay re-casters but if a friend offeredme a plaster cast of a bastion wall i would take it.

CDs software and ebooks are all fair game for piracy these days and we need to be informed of our options as adults.

[BobbieTheDamned]

I totally agree on your point. As someone who casts bits myself its obviously an issue I've thought about.

Its a shame warseer are so afraid of legal action that they would close down a thread like that; as you said its an issue people should be made aware of and should be talked about openly not a hushed up topic.

PDF documents are so easily copied I'm surprised so many companies use them. However, I think the redistribution of old, long out of production games so gamers can continue to play them is awesome. Games that are either impossible to find or go for stupid prices should still be able to be enjoyed by other people who missed them when they were released first time around.

[MortiS-the-Lost]

This is really 2 separate issues here, re-casting and piracy both of which are rather cloudy issues surrounded by copyright laws. I am not a lawyer nor ever likely to be. However in capacity as a respected critic of the miniature gaming industry (shut up, I am!), owner of a huge amount of miniatures and general painting and modelling guru (shut up, I am!) I am expected to add to this debate. So here goes ...

I'll deal with re-casting first:

General Biakal wrote

there is a difference between a "mate" who casts the odd bit and you pay him enough for costs and sundries perhaps three times a year and an ebay pirate selling two or three a week for genuine profit.

one hurts FW, one dosent.

General Biakal wrote

i think even GW's lawyers respect the difference between a home made cast for hobby purposes and ones made for profit...

Yes but the only real difference here is scale and GW's perception of lost profit. This is vast issue that will take more than a few lines to explain and I may have to make later posts clarify my points.

Before I get going on this I think it's worth making clear what GW's position is on the subject

4. Counterfeiting/Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

We are encountering people who counterfeit our miniatures and products more and more frequently. Counterfeiting is a crime in most countries worldwide. In addition to the other penalties, you can go to prison for counterfeiting. The same is true of peer-to-peer file sharing - if you have not paid for the material and you download it using peer-to-peer software, you are engaging in illegal activity. The same is true even if you already own a copy of the relevant Codex or Army Book. Please remember that Games Workshop does not produce its rule books or codices in electronic format - if you ever see any such material in electronic format, it is likely to be the product of criminal or infringing activity.

BE AWARE that we will happily spend money bringing counterfeiters and other infringers to justice, regardless of the cost. Such activities kill the hobby for everyone.

By way of background to this position, Games Workshop is the world's largest wargames and miniatures manufacturer. This has not come about overnight but rather as a result of over 20 years of hard work and the investment of considerable amounts of money into designing the best, most evocative, and detailed games and miniatures that we possibly can.

In a free market, anyone willing to invest the necessary time and effort is entitled to the same opportunities we had when we started out. We welcome such fair 'competition' - in fact, we don't even think of it as competition because it all helps to build the hobby.

However, sadly, there are an unscrupulous few who try to take a shortcut to success by copying the design of our games and models and trading on the goodwill we've built up over the years - these people are counterfeiters.

We therefore want to make it clear that Games Workshop will not tolerate counterfeiting of its products nor any other unauthorized use of its trade marks, trade dress, copyright material, or other intellectual property and always seeks the maximum civil and criminal penalties that the law allows

As you can see GW perceives any recasting of their products as a threat!


It's just that GW is more likely to deal with a big threat than a small threat.
An eBay-er stelling 100's is perceived as a bigger threat than some one making a few casts for a friend. There for GW are more likely to go after some one selling lots of recasts and making prophet from it. GW will only sue people who they can get their 'lost' money back from. (also some one trading on eBay is easier to spot than some one trading on a local basis)
Also the distinction between mass casting and 'only casting a few' is not as clear as you might think and there is a slippery slope between the 2.
As any one who has made a mold to cast their own miniatures from will tell you it's a (relativity) expensive thing to do and people like to cover their costs (after all making a mold is an investment). Therefore if a mold is made it can be expected to be cast from quite a few times, no one in their right mind would make a mold only to be used once or twice.
Therefore the question becomes 'how many is too many?', the answer is that all recasting is perceived as a threat by GW, it's only the size of the threat that changes. Of course so we are only looking at 1 hypothetical re-caster making 1 hypothetical mold. Lets look at the bigger picture.
Lets say that 1 person made 1 mold and used it 10 times, on it's own it dosn't look like a big threat to GW's profits. But if 10 people independently of each other made 1 mold and cast it 10 times suddenly you've 100 recasts floating about and GW can't afford to sue all these people separately.
A universally apply-able philosophy states something along the lines of “To determine if an action is right or wrong, consider what would happen if everybody in the world did it” (this is one of favourite philosophical statements and works with everything!)  
Applied to this situation it would mean there would be an incalculable number of recasts and GW would see proportionally little-to-no money for it.

In fact to look at in one (some what odd) way GW looses more profit from small low-level recasting than it dose from mass runs being sold on eBay because GW's lawyers will be getting GW's 'lost' profits back from the re-casters in the court room.  

What's debatable from a consumer perspective is whether GW are genuinely loosing profit in this way. This part of the issue is directly linked to GW's high prices and their monopoly over their own corner of the miniatures industry. The question is this: if you see something in a store and decide it's expensive and decide not to buy it, but later come by the same thing for much cheaper in another store and buy it from there, has the first store really made a loss? This simple answer is no, they just haven't made a profit. 2 things can be taken from this example, 1 is that the first store needs to lower it's prices to become competitive and 2 is the further question 'if the 2nd store hadn't been there would you have bought the product?' the answer in most cases will be 'no because it was too expensive' the decision not to buy has already been made at that stage and it's only the cheaper price in the 2nd store that changed your mind, therefore no one made any profit.
The point is there is a difference between losing profit and just not gaining profit.    

The simple matter of the fact is that by having the high prices they do and attempting to monopolise their corner of the market in the way they do, GW create conditions under which illegal re-casting is a viable alternative. If GW lowered their prices the problem would lessen considerably, because their would be no demand for their products at lower prices. Of course GW has a stable, loyal and monopolised market in the form of the ignorant young gamers and their parents who don't know any better than what GW tells them, so GW don't feel the need to lower their prices and deal with the problem in this way.  

The fact that there is a cheap and perfectly legal alternative to buying re-casts of GW miniatures (namely buying miniatures designed and produced by other companies) is something GW don't want gamers to know, but that is a discussion  for another thread and not entirely relevant to this discussion as we are talking about illegal re-casts and not proxy miniatures.

Another thing remember that GW are most likely not the only victims of re-casting and smaller miniature producing companies can't call on the kind of legal aid GW can, should they find someone re-casting their products.

Quick Foot-Note
For those not in-the-know: mold-making in it's self is not illegal, it's what you make the molds of which is the distinction here. If you make your own miniatures from scratch and cast them and sell them you're perfectly within your rights and you don't need GW (or any one else's) permission as long as you are not breaking Copyright laws.