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Battlescribe got cease and desist?


Dark Trainer

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Was reading an article the battle scribe got a cease and desist from Games workshop. Much as it's within their territory there's nothing as good or as quick to get a digital army building tool. So for the time being the older stuff is being ignored but no ninth edition to compete with their new app which I hear sucks.

 

Thoughts?

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The data repositories are probably* in violation of Games Workshop’s intellectual property rights, but being the decentralized work of dozens of anonymous individual coders and hosted across dozens of fly-by-night server farms... Good luck hitting them with a Cease & Desist letter, let alone an actual law suit Complaint.

GW really just needs to put a halfway decent army building app of their own on the market.

*I am not a lawyer, don’t use me for actual legal advice. Consult a real attorney.

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Could it be argued that people can pay for Battlescribe (the non-add version), then download the repositories that and use Battlescribe for making an army list, and because Battlescribe is making money from that, it's in violation of intellectual property rights? Happens all the time in the software industry. You can't make any app on the Google Play store or Apple's App store that makes money without giving 30% of that money to them.

I really think Battlescribe's days are numbered. 😞

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It could also be argued that people can pay for Microsoft Excel, download a third-party database for it, and make army lists from that.

The Google and Apple app stores aren’t equivalent, they’re charging a percentage in order to do the work of marketing your product and hosting the data. The landlord of your corner grocery store “takes a cut” of what the grocer sells too.

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23 hours ago, Ish said:

The data repositories are probably* in violation of Games Workshop’s intellectual property rights, but being the decentralized work of dozens of anonymous individual coders and hosted across dozens of fly-by-night server farms... Good luck hitting them with a Cease & Desist letter, let alone an actual law suit Complaint.

GW really just needs to put a halfway decent army building app of their own on the market.

*I am not a lawyer, don’t use me for actual legal advice. Consult a real attorney.

Napster was sued and shutdown. They never posted the files and we're decentralized too, however the lynch pin was they hosted the files. Battlescribe hosts the files, I would imagine precedent applies here.

 

The article I read, eluded to GW trying to release its own subscription model app and taking away competition.

 

 

However, good to hear not true?

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Rather than throw a bunch of money at a lawsuit to shut down a competitor, why not just buy Battlescribe and have a functional app?

GW is a model company first, a rules creater second, and a software developer...uhh...somewhere way down the line. Stick to what you're good at, and pay someone else to do the stuff you're not good at.

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On 9/19/2020 at 12:35 PM, Mulgrok said:

No need to have actual proof or a legitimate case if you can potentially bring it to trial and let legal fees bankrupt the target.  The corporate form of "competition".

All battlescribe would need to do is set up a gofundme and users would flock to their defense. Then they would need to get a decent lawyer is have the case dismissed.

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7 hours ago, Dark Trainer said:

Napster was sued and shutdown. They never posted the files and we're decentralized too, however the lynch pin was they hosted the files. Battlescribe hosts the files, I would imagine precedent applies here.

I'm pretty sure Battlescribe doesn't host the data files, do they? I thought the files were hosted elsewhere.

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Also, Napster didn't host the files, either. The way Napster and the other torrenting systems worked, the data was streamed in bits and pieces from online users who had put the files up for that purpose (I used to use Napster and its descendants a lot back in the day.) They still got nailed, but I think that was more because they weren't even trying to police stuff. They survived after the lawsuits were concluded, but they just wound up putting disclaimers up, because they literally had no way to stop people from sharing music and stuff illegally.

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2 hours ago, Ish said:

It’s not so much “they should buy BattleScribe” as it is “they should offer a freelancer contract to some of the people that programmed it.”

Yes. This.

The same way the federal government hires convicted hackers. Pay people smarter than you to work for you. Otherwise, you'll be pay anyway. There is no value added to your company in a legal battle, just money spent punishing people who are better than you at what you wish you were good at.

Spend the same money to offer a better product.

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Seriously.

So side tangent here. My job is mainly putting the right resources on the right job. I know a good portion of electrical, plumbing, HVAC etc but I do use specialists from time to time. When I outline a job to them I end the conversation with, "Does that sound right? I don't tell my mechanic how to fix my car."

Usually I get a "yep" but occasionally I'll be off. Almost like these people do this exact thing, all day, every day.

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