OK kids, we’re going to start out today with a little
game. I’m going to say some words, then ask you some questions, and then
we’ll move on. Ready? Great.
Q1: What do you call a person who searches unknown
territories? (I came up with “explorer” for this one myself)
Q2: Now… what if that man or woman did said work and/or
activity, in oh, I don’t know, the deep sea? What would you
call that person? Would you call them a deep sea explorer? Of
course you would – it’s an explorerthat does their
thing in the deep waters of the damn sea.
So now let’s talk about another occupation/location
combination phrase – Space Marine. That phrase has been used a bunch of
times over the years in science fiction and gaming
and conjures different ideas to different people. For me
personally the term makes me think about Blizzard’s Starcraft series,
and the nameless hero from id Software’s Doomback in the day when
gore only came in 16 bits. But for a lot of other people, Space Marine
is synonymous with Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop and video
game from Games Workshop. And that’s cool, because it’s not like
it’s a specific and proprietary thing that someone could own
right?
… right?
Well it definitely was a question that came up when science
fiction authorM. C. A. Hogarth
surprisingly found her book Spots the Space Marinepulled
off of Amazon’s digital shelves thanks to a DMCA takedown request from Games
Workshop. As it turns out that Games Workshop kind ofdoes own
the name to a certain degree with trademarks they have registered in the USA and Europe. And while in Europe
that trademark covers pretty much everything involving the Space Marine name,
in the United States it only covers the tabletop game and pieces. So why
then, were they able to take action against a book in the United
States?
The DMCA, that lovely set of rules that a couple weeks ago
said you couldn’t unlock your phone anymore, allows copyright owners to get
content taken down via a takedown request. It’s the reason that there’s
certain videos on YouTube that you can’t watch anymore – because copyright
holders have requested that the content be removed. But the problem for
Games Workshop is that the DMCA works with copyrights – you know, what the “C”
stands for – and not trademarks. So when Amazon took the book off of
their site, it was premature on a claim that didn’t have any teeth to begin
with.
But what if the DMCA did support
trademarks? As mentioned before, their US trademark doesn’t cover
books. So how did Games Workshop justify trying to shut Hogarth
down? By claiming that after starting to sell digital books online, that
they have a “common law” trademark on the phrase Space Marine in
the United States.
Really guys?
These trademark trolls came after Hogarth hard and as a
small author she didn’t have the money to fend them off with a legal
team. But I still don’t really understand how any court would entertain
the claim – “Space Marine” in both concept and name, has been used a number of
times historically. If you check out TV Tropes to
see the list. That in conjunction with their gimped trademark and I’m not
even seeing a case here. At any rate, she’s found support from a number
of people on the internet through social media backing her cause, in the sci-fi
and gaming community, as well as fans organizing boycotts of Games Workshop pieces.
And it’s helping shine a giant spotlight on the bullying tactics of copyright
(and now trademark) trolls.
But there seems to have been some progress. While
Games Workshop has been following their policy of not commenting, as of my
checking this morning, you can again find Spots the Space Marine on Amazon. I applaud them on their decision to put it
back up for sale and not allowing this sort of corporate bullying to stand.
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