(Or the curious case of the zealously-defended intellectual property.)
The other day, the folks who run the website Boardgamegeek.com received a little Cease & Desist letter from the legal department of Games Workshop. In response, all user-generated content related to Games Workshop products has been removed from BGG.
You want to hear lots of howling, hissing and spitting? Next time you visit the People Zoo, poke a long legal stick into the Gamer Cage and give it a twist or two. I mean, man, this time the natives are really banging the bongos. It’s an event that’s stirring up more emotional discussion and vitriol than the Ameritrash Debates or the Banhammer Wars ever came close to.
I’m not a lawyer. I AM a gamer. But I’m also a former Big Corporate wonk who, on more than one occasion, participated in Big Corporate meetings with Big Corporate lawyers engaged in the defense of our Big Corporate intellectual property rights.
For a gamer who either creates or enjoys user-generated content related to a GW product, having their content burned down at the behest of GW is a bit like having their heart ripped out and kicked down the street at the bitter end of an illicit love affair. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s like discovering that they’re only one of countless other “girls in every port”. The Space Marines just told them that the sex was good, but “true luv” was never in the cards.
I understand the anger. Such user-generated content – unofficial FAQs, rules summaries, play aids, charts, forms, whatever – are typically, truly, labors of love. Gamers create them because they enjoy the games and want to help other players enjoy them just as much. For better or for worse, geeky or not, efforts at that level usually involve some degree of emotional attachment to the game in question.
But just because you love a game doesn’t mean it’s going to love you back.
For Games Workshop it’s all just business. Beyond a doubt, plenty of other game companies actively encourage ‘community’ creation of content relating to their games. But here’s the catch: Games Workshop – despite their name – isn’t ‘just’ a game company. They are Games Workshop Group PLC, a publicly-traded company listed on the London Stock Exchange. They are a multi-national group with wholly-owned subsidiaries in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan and Italy. They move plenty of product through independent retailers, but they also own more than 350 hobby centers.
Unlike most other ‘game’ companies, they make a LOT of money from licensing and from the content they themselves generate related to their games. Their core business is still the gaming hobby – but revenues from related content are ever-expanding (as you can read in their investors’ reports). Their revenues aren’t just generated from selling “stuff”. Their business model is deeply rooted in a broad range of well-developed IP.
As a multi-national concern, one of the things they’ve got to deal with is the different ways different national legal jurisdictions treat the defense of intellectual property. A company seeking to protect their IP can never go wrong by demonstrating active, broad defense of all their properties. Even if some of those properties are no longer being developed or supported in production, as long as they are agressively policed by the company, no jurisdiction is likely ever to consider those properties abandoned.
No doubt about it, the GW action has riled a lot of BGG devotees. A number of them will take their hobby dollars elsewhere as a result. But there’s always a new recruiting class of 13-year-olds ready to walk into GW stores, so any noticeable short-term impact will be offset soon enough. It’s a bit of a cold calculation, but obviously – at least at corporate HQ – the long-term numbers argue for a rigorous, no-prisoners approach to the defense of their IP.
A case can be made that some of the BGG content didn’t need to be taken down, but I can’t blame the site owners for addressing the issue with the broadest possible response. Perhaps GW’s C&D was overly broad – but that’s the way IP lawyers work. They make as sweeping a request as possible and await either compliance or a legal challenge. It usually means that bigger companies with legal departments have their way with smaller outfits who can’t pay to argue.
Welcome to the majors, kid.
