GW? You just gotta love them. (Long since hijacked!)

[finn17]

Why you no read first post???

This is nothing to do with competition. This all happened in the past. It\'s just GW being arsey again and not caring a hoot about its customer base.

We/I was talking about a historical archive of what were then, licensed products....

Check out the link....

http://www.armorcast.com/

It was about products that were discontinued in the 80\'s or so. Next thing, their lawyers will be trying to shut down \'Stuff of Legends\'...or even this site for featuring their product and \'gaining hits\' because of them.

 

[AlexDaKid]

No you see thats what I\'m saying Finn its not your beef in particular that I\'m referring to.

I\'m just referring the whole \'not caring about its customer base\' thing, you see they do care about their customer base otherwise they wouldn\'t have one.

Yes they are harsh at times, no this website poses them no threat and yes what they\'re doing is pointless but its no reason to hate them.

 

[darthfoley]

I say launch GW into the sun.

 

[AlexDaKid]

Why?

 

[darthfoley]

Cause it\'s my opinion that the sun would be a good place for them. No deeper meaning than that.

 

[spike_92]

Originally posted by AlexDaKid
Yes they are harsh at times, no this website poses them no threat and yes what they\'re doing is pointless but its no reason to hate them.

Wow that definitly wrapped it up and i totally agree.

 

[AlexDaKid]

Spank you!

 

[finn17]

I cherish my hate...

Because they are a bunch of anally retentive, letigious b*astards, they have taken away a resource on the web that I used to refer to a lot. That\'s why I hate them at this moment. That\'s my reason....

I was only looking at the Armorcast site because I\'d just spent 150 quid on a Forge World Eldar Titan for God\'s sake and just wanted to see what the old version looked like. But no, not allowed. They are obviously afraid I have a time machine and might travel back to the 1980s and buy from Armorcast instead of them:duh:

 

[vincegamer]

Originally posted by finn17
This is nothing to do with competition.

Actually, this has everything to do with competition. GW sells miniatures. Armorcast sells miniatures. Therefore they are competitors.

The way it works is, you go to Armorcast\'s site to see the archive. While there you think you\'d like to buy the old stuff, but can\'t, but hey, that armorcast product is nice, so you buy that.
If armorcast hadn\'t had the archive, you said yourself you wouldn\'t even have been on their site so you wouldn\'t have spent money on an armorcast mini, aiding GW\'s competition. (hypothetical example)

Suppose you sell \"Finn\'s Hammers.\"
Bob used to sell Finn\'s Hammers under contract but doesn\'t have the contract anymore. In fact Finn\'s Hammers are now out of production and Finn makes the Finn Hammer Mark II. Bob still has a sign in the window with a big picture of a Finn\'s Hammer. Joe wants a Finn\'s Hammer so he goes to Bob\'s store (or web site) but Bob doesn\'t have Finn\'s Hammers. He does have the new french Rachkam Hammer though, and it\'s pretty cool, so instead of going to Finn\'s shop to buy a Finn\'s Hammer Mark II, Joe just buys the Rackham Hammer from Bob and goes home. Finn lost a customer to Bob purely because Bob had a picture of Finn\'s Hammer in the window.

Now a more customer-friendly answer for GW would be to maintain their own picture archive instead of just blocking out others.

 

[Wren]

Originally posted by Warhammer
I\'m happy to live in a country like Canada
where GW\'s sickening threat campaign
is ILLEGAL (yay Great Canadian Miniatures discount house! )
and where the same bloodsucking IP cretins have LOST in court
trying to sue music downloaders out of spite because they
have not changed their model of distribution to suit consumer needs.

My understanding of the reasoning for the Canadian court decision is slightly different. I think the decision is in line with previous court decisions that go back to photocopiers and VCRs. It seems like the attitude of the courts is that whether copying stuff is right or wrong is pretty academic, the issue is how can the original producers of stuff get some protection. The answer the courts have come up with is to add a small surcharge to the purchase of any blank media, and those fees go to the copyright holders and/or creators. Or something. I\'m not a lawyer or anything, I\'ve just been vaguely hearing about this since the days of photocopying articles out of books in the school library, and a friend who follows this stuff more closely told me that was the basis of the ruling on music downloads recently.

All of that, however, applies to private citizens making copies of things for personal use. Company use of another company\'s trademarked product as is going on in the Armorcast example would probably be viewed in Canada much as it would in any other western country, for reasons much along the lines of vincegamer\'s example.

Canadian slander/libel law is fairly different than American, if anyone wants an overview of that, too!.

PS. This is not the topic I would have expected for my 100th post. ;->

 

[supervike]

no point here, just an observation...

Imagine a company that started off by an ingenious entrepreneur that had visions of bringing fun to everyone.

The fan base loved the products and the imagry and happily throws money at said company.

They thrive for years, but somewhere down the line, the ingenious creator steps aside.

The business model needs to change. Competitors are now chipping away from the product that the company once had an almost monopoly on.

Still though, this company is the place to be...young fresh artistic talent will do anything to work there. The customer/fan base grows larger with each new generation.

But that gnawing competition just won\'t go away. The success of this company is too great, competitors really want a slice of that pie.

The fresh new employees are now run by corporate hawks, who only can see the bottom line. The artists/employees that do go elsewhere complain about the almost totalitarian atmosphere that is created at the company.

In addition to new products, this company also repackages, re issues, discontinues lines only to have them reappear later. The company ventures into new media, new ideas.

The corporate lawyers are incredibly adept at seeing even the most vague IP violations, and jump all over it. The legitimate competetors are bad enough, they can\'t have anything that remotely looks like it comes from this company.

All the while there is a certain segment of the fan base is becoming disenfranchised...no longer loyal. But what does that company care? Each year the \'new edition\' comes out, and the younger fan base (with all that spending money) just keeps growing....


Sound familiar? You do realize, however, that I was talking about Disney???

 

[WarHAMMER]

Artists Depend On A Rich Public Domain

I don\'t want to get too far off track, but when I read finn17\'s post, what it meant
to me was that he was no longer able to
access pictures/information that presumably should be in the public domain for the purpose of artist\'s using
said images to further artistic endeavor.

\"Borrowing is ubiquitous, inevitable, and, most importantly, good. Contrary to the romantic notion that true genius inheres in creating something completely new, genius is often better described as opening up new meanings on well-trodden themes.\"

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html

 

[LavronYor]

Not to be too stupid, but how many posts of old titans do we have here at CMON. I have seen plenty on Ebay, and really, if I want a picture of anything, that is where I look first. Not to mention the fact that I can think of no better way to combat the suits at GW than to buy their products from someone else.

 

[the_alleycat]

If Armourcast make money on anything miniature related through the same site that these pictures were on... Yeah, i think i can see why they\'d want them off.

GW\'s CEO is a guy who spent a plane trip to Japan painting goblins, not so sure he\'s a \'guy in suit\'.
What GW did realise was that unless you have a decent buisiness model, the company will cease to exist and then there is no hobby for anyone. I can think of two reasonably goos sci-fi games that sank in the last 5 years, along with the companies that made them. Privateer and Confrontation seem to be pricing along GW lines, and they seem to be making a success of things...

@Tammy - I\'ve never heard anything about GW selling \'toys\', the word i\'ve always heard is hobby, and i know a lot of GW employees.

But... I\'m not gonna get involved in a GW are evil conversation. Views on them are so polarised and dare i say, borderline fanatical, that discussions rarely go anywhere.

IMHO, GW still make [overall] the best minis/toy soilders/figures in the world. Only recently have companies like Rackham and Privateer got close. They still have a way to go, but it\'s nice to have the added variety.

 

[Legacy Account]

Not that they pay your wages or anything....... You refer to GW as \'Us\'. As for GW producing better minis than Rackham? In your (and their!) dreams!! Privateer Press have a real enthusiast and creative individual at the helm - another person GW let slip through their fingers! All their development people seem to come through the ranks now, resulting in heavy \'in breeding\' of ideas. We all know how bad that is eh?!lol

 

[Trevor]

I would say that no company produces uniformly excellent minis, although rackham do seem to have a high proportion of great sculpts, the problem is that many seem to have those stupidly thin parts that are impossible to pin, and the metal is just softer and weaker than GWs.

If I like a mini, I like it, couldn\'t care less who makes it.

@ Spacemunkie, been meaning to ask this for a while, wtf is a Chav?

 

[finn17]

The chav and chav nots...

Trevor, this should answer all your questions. It is a new term and wont have made it as far as you yet

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-cha2.htm

It should also satisfy your curiosity about:janners, smicks, spides, moakes, steeks, bazzas, scuffheads, stigs, stangers, yarcos, and kappa slappers :flip:

 

[Legacy Account]

Chav: A tracksuit garbed, Burberry cap wearing, gold chain festooned, sovereign ringed, car stealing juvenile delinquent.

The term is now being applied to anyone who dresses in this fashion, criminal or not!

Oh, hardcore Chavs tuck one trackie leg into a sock.......

 

[frenchkid]

hey we have those over here too Well they do have a purpose, I can\'t help but beeig amused everytime I see one of \'them\'. And were I live they\'re not even dangerous, they\'re just trying to look tough.

 

[JohnC]

I was just looking for this archive this morning, funny that I saw it gone to, and now I\'m catching up on this thread.

The photos of the color schemes and banners, etc on the AC site were GW photos of GW models, not AC resin models painted in GW colors. The AC models themselves were painted as GW models, but the \'painting guides\' were right outta White dwarf, Codex Titanicus.

With that being said, I can see why GW nixed the pfotos, as they were their property, but as for the AC resin models themselves I think that that\'s a bit pissy. Would GW feel that way if those very same pix ended up somewhere like Portent, here, eldaronline etc?

Would they feel the same way about my personally painted Warhound or (pizza-slice) old-skool Eldar Falcon? What are the rules regarding that? Will GW send me a nasty-gram to remove my AC models from a fansite? AC.com might as well be a fan site for GW becuase they don\'t sell GW products, right?

Sounds a bit pissy to me on GW\'s part, but I guess it\'s their perogative.