Games Workshop, the owners of the Warhammer IP, have filed suit against Curse Inc., owners of the vast Curse Network of sites, which includes Warhammer Alliance.com, the subject of the suit.

Games Workshop is citing trademark infringement, cybersquatting (the Warhammer Alliance domain name), dilution, and unfair competition. According to Curse.com administrator DoranM, the complaint also states that Games Workshop was unable to contact any of the Curse administrators or "decision makers," despite the contact links available at the site.

You can view the full complaint here.

[Thanks sh4pnel for the tip!]

Wait, what?

I'm completely lost now. Why would they sue a fansite?

I dont understand. Can someone break it down to stupid level for me...........

Do they really want to kill off whatever community is left of this game? they have no idea how many players they are going to piss off with this. More players use Warhammer alliance compared to official forums.

Originally posted by Shastra

Do they really want to kill off whatever community is left of this game? they have no idea how many players they are going to piss off with this. More players use Warhammer alliance compared to official forums.

Luck has nothing to do with this game's failure.

Remember Games Workshop is not Mythic.   It is Games Workshop suing.

A fansite created by fans who like the Warhammer universe are going to get slapped about by Games Workshop which seemingly want to spoil their reputation...?

This'll get dropped once they realise how silly they're being...

they are suing Curse, since they are the "new" owners of the website (and are making money out of it) It stopped being a normal fansite quite some time ago.

Originally posted by Shastra

Do they really want to kill off whatever community is left of this game? they have no idea how many players they are going to piss off with this. More players use Warhammer alliance compared to official forums.

 Games Workshop doesnt care about the WAR MMO anymore, thats Mythics thing, not theirs. Games workshop sold Mythic the licenseing or whatever to make the MMO, this is completely unrelated (well not completely, but its more related to the entire Warhammer IP, not the MMO itself).

And yeah this seems pretty f-ing ridiculous to me. If this is allowed, then really every company out there could just go around suing every fansite ever created because fo things like them using the trademarked name anywhere in it. I lol'ed at the "warhammer allience making people think the site is in some sort of alliance with games workshop" portion of it. If thats what they get when going to the site, they need some new employees. The average person knows the difference between official sites, and fan / information / reference sites.

I hope the judge laughs in their faces.

Forum messages are not "contact links" in my book. An email address, physical address or other contact information would be the way to go. And in looking over their site, there are NO links that say "contact" anywhere on the front page.

In looking at GW's IP policies (easily found on their website), the major portion of the suit is relating to the name of the website (Warhammeralliance.com) which is prohibited by GW's IP use policy. If the page was named something else with a subtitle of "Warhammer Alliance", my guess is that GW would not have done anything.

However, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on tv.

I wish it were possible for these companies to sue any site that posted walkthroughs, cheats or mods that trivialized the content of their games. Suddenly cheating at games, and using walkthroughs is as much cheating as using hack programs, has become acceptable and it's doing nothing but hurting these companies.

Games Workshop has long had a history of near fascist like protection of their IP and copyright. They have shut down NUMEROUS fansites for their games over the years, not just for the video games, but the miniature games as well. They have always kind of been the Microsoft of the gaming industry, imo.

Now you know why I stopped dealing with Games Workshop directly as a retailer. They are a bunch of snooty morons with their heads rammed up their own butts. I dealt with them for 5 years before I finally said screw it and went through a third party distributor... If their stupid games didn't sell so well I would have just dropped them completely. I would not be surprised one bit if this was not a "mistake" at all, nor would I be surprised if they didn't drop this lawsuit...

Go Games Workshop, go!

I've always felt that Curse are a bunch of greedy crooks with shady business practices. I hold no sympathy for them if they're getting slapped around legally. I wouldn't shed a tear if their whole network went under.

Whether or not GW is being overzealous about their IP, I don't really have an opinion. Frankly, though, it's their right to control the use of their IP. 

Originally posted by Blurr

I've always felt that Curse are a bunch of greedy crooks with shady business practices. I hold no sympathy for them if they're getting slapped around legally. I wouldn't shed a tear if their whole network went under.

Whether or not GW is being overzealous about their IP, I don't really have an opinion. Frankly, though, it's their right to control the use of their IP. 

That's harsh, I know most people will sob uncontrollably if anything happens to them.

Sounds like they want to use the domain name.

-tal

Brif why should anyone sob about Curse?  98% of the Keyloggers that are planted in in their mods are placed their by them, I have heard Blizzard devs say time and again that Curse is the main pipeline to hacked accounts. It is one of the reasons that they are implementing their own mod delivery system that checks for Trojans.