If you check out Paulson Games you’ll find a website that clearly, at a glance, belongs to a small business. In fact, the contact address is a Hotmail one and the text refers to “I” – meaning a single individual – and Paulson Games may well just be Jon Paulson.
Just before Christmas, in 2010, Games Workshop announced they were sueing Jon Paulson and Chapterhouse Studios over trademark issues.
The good news today is that Games Workshop have settled their legal wrestle with Paulson.
Paulson Games and Games Workshop have agreed on the range of products Paulson Games is permitted to sell without violating Games Workshop’s claimed rights in its Warhammer 40,000 characters and have agreed to terminate the litigation between them.
The case against Chapterhouse Studios continues.
Now, it’s unlikely the case that Paulson was selling too many to too wide a range of Games Workshop products that the company became worried about their IP rights. So why deploy the attack lawyers?
We can only speculate. Always dangerous. After all, perhaps Games Workshop spent two years trying to talk Jon Paulson into a professional relationship and, perhaps, all he ever did was to blow raspberries. Unlikely – but we don’t know.
We do know that Games Workshop is very serious about protecting their IP. That’s their intellectual property. Companies that use Games Workshop IP in a too arty, too significant or ways too far from the path of correctness as outlined by Games Workshop run the risk of upsetting the balance.
I imagine it’s rather like being the musical group behind some stunning steampunk song – only to discover that someone’s gone and used your music as the soundtrack to a pro-whale hunting political campaign. You’d be horrified at the application of your creation. That said; we might ask whether it’s fair to compare pro-whale hunting campaigns to SMEs trying to sell Games Workshop products.
What do you think?
Hat tip to Wee Gamers.
