On Games Workshop, IP and Fan Works

Let’s talk about Games Workshop, Intellectual Property, and social media’s impression that the sky is falling and GW lawyers are going to be knocking at the door any minute now coming for your Sanguinius/OC fanfic.

First, a disclaimer: I am not an IP lawyer. I am certainly not an international IP lawyer.

The Rules Aren’t New

GW’s recent post about their IP policies isn’t new – the law has always been the law. Games Workshop might not have been thinking about enforcing it particularly vigorously (there’s not a lot of evidence that they’re particularly interested in vigorously enforcing it now, beyond the things that are very clearly Warhammer-based short films), but it was always there. Yes, they are keeping a closer eye on things now that Warhammer+ exists. That’s not unreasonable – “We’re selling a product in this space, are there unlicensed copies also being sold” is…not exactly a revolutionary bit of management practice.

This is more like a lifeguard blowing a whistle and tapping the sign that says no running by the pool.

It doesn’t matter that you were doing it five minutes earlier. It was a rule then, it’s a rule now.

The Problem of Crowdfunding

An additional wrinkle in all this is the rise of heavily monetized “fan art”. Let’s take a look at If The Emperor Had a Text to Speech Device, a popular YouTube channel that preemptively (and this is important, they did this without a C&D letter, let alone a lawsuit, from GW) shut itself down.

Brother Alfabusa’s Patreon pulls in \$15,789 a month. That’s over \$180,000 a year. Income calculators for YouTube channels have an absurd uncertainty margin (for the channel in question, it’s between \$6,000 and \$93,000) so lets be super, super-chairitable and pretend there is no additional income from YouTube.

\$180K isn’t “fan art”. At best it’s an extremely lucrative side hustle. In actuality, it’s a small business.

And that’s one of the major problems – crowdfunding and the internet, both of which are great, has allowed “fan art” to transcend fan art and become someone’s living. That guy you know who makes the pretty cool Greater Demon conversions becomes someone on Kickstarter funding a ICantBelieveItsNotMortarion campaign. A video series that is definitely entirely about GW’s IP gets a few million YouTube views and people start asking for a Patreon to support more.

It’s not “fan art” if you monetize it.

It’s you monetizing some else’s IP.

When one business wants to do that with another business, the term for it is “licensing”.

GW is also not the first people to do this – Paramount, which has been fairly permissive with Star Trek stuff, had to shut down the “fan film” Axanar when they started acting like they were an actual production studio. Because they weren’t.

Unstable Platforms

Building your platform on someone else’s IP has always been a dangerous game. This is true in any industry. Just as any one of the innumerable Twitter analytics start-ups that were relying on the Twitter “firehose” being open and easy to access the day that Twitter decided that maybe that wasn’t how things were going to be any more. Or anyone who has been hit with “The algorithm changed” on any number of platforms.

You’re dependent on the IP holder to, essentially, not mind. And sometimes, they don’t. Especially when they’re neither making nor losing money on indulging you.

And when that changes, it’s a problem. You can be disappointed, sure. But it’s hardly a corporation being especially evil, or unreasonable, to want to monetize what they create and not want to compete with people who are using that for their own businesses.

Because this was never about fan art. Disney, probably the most vigilant protector of their IP in history, still has a plethora of fan art out there. This is about making a business out of the unlicensed use of someone else’s creative output. Don’t do that – and if you do, you need to accept that the ride can come to a stop at any time.

Speaking of which – the one creator they have issued a C&D to? If your animations were out-and-out Warhammer enough that GW actively simply wanted to hire you and bring it in house? That is both the kindest possible way an IP holder could have handled that.

“GW IP Is Derivative Anyway”

The common line is that GW is just ripping off Moorcock, Geiger, etc. etc.

And yet no one is making “What if Stormbringer Was Like Siri?” YouTube channels.

 

 

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