Games Workshop Likes A Guy's Warhammer Fanfilms So Much It Hires Him To Do An Official One

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Being fully immersed in an era of copyright protectionism, it seems that we've become numb to the effects of it in many ways. One of those effects is how fans who create content around their favorite franchises are treated. The basic policy of the entertainment industry towards fan-films and similar creations appears to be that they can either bully those projects out of existence, sue them out of existence, or do one or the other even after confusingly giving tacit approval for such projects. Those are the options in full, as far as most entertainment companies are concerned, while the public looks at those actions and shrugs their collective shoulders. You'll even occasionally hear noises such as, "Well, what did these fans expect?" All this, keep in mind, for the crime of trying to express fandom, and free advertising for the franchise they love.Well, if you're Games Workshop, the company behind the Warhammer 40k franchise, you react to a dedicated fan who has created great fan-films by hiring him to do his thing professionally.

Richard Boylan wowed us with both Helsreach and Guardsman, short, gripping takes on different pockets of the Warhammer 40,000 universe in both animation and live-action. And it turns out he wowed Games Workshop itself, too, because he’s now helping the company make an official Warhammer animated series.GW has now unveiled Angels of Death, a new animated series set to release from Boylan and his team in 2019.

It’s cool to see Games Workshop branching out the Warhammer brand like this again—it has tried animated movies in the past, but they’ve been a bit lowkey. Hopefully, by reaching out to Boylan, who’s already proved that he can do great things with animation on a fan’s budget of...well, personal passion, something really cool can come out of Angels of Deathgetting the proper GW seal of approval.

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Appeals Court Hands ReDigi Another Loss; Says Reselling Mp3s Violates Copyright Law

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Things were never going to turn out well for mp3 remarketer ReDigi. Its business model -- facilitating third party sales of digital files -- worked better as a rhetorical device. It attempted -- perhaps inadvertently -- to obtain an answer to the eternal question: do you own the stuff you buy? When it comes to digital goods, the answer is almost always "no." Platforms shut down. Rightsholders dissolve contracts. File formats lose support. And DRM is all over everything, frequently making pirated goods superior to those people pay for.

ReDigi claimed it could harness this untapped market, somehow providing a sales platform for infinite goods that wouldn't allow sellers to sell the same goods infinitely. It claimed it could verify the destruction of the "original" files -- something that could be easily circumvented by storing additional copies where ReDigi couldn't "see" them.

Obviously, ReDigi was sued almost immediately. Records labels sought -- but didn't get -- a permanent injunction blocking ReDigi from getting into the used mp3 business. But they did get a win in court roughly a year later. Five years ago, a federal court ruled in favor of record labels, finding that ReDigi's business resulted in the production of new copies of files -- something not allowed under copyright law. If ReDigi just allowed for the swap of physical media (hard drives, thumb drives with mp3s on them), perhaps it might be lawful. But even then, the court seemed unwilling to entertain the hardware option as anything but rhetorical

ReDigi appealed. Five years later, it finally has a decision in hand, but not the one it wanted. Eriq Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter has more details.

Writing for the panel of Second Circuit judges, Pierre Leval doesn't buy ReDigi's defense that there is no unauthorized reproduction at play when consumers use ReDigi to resell their digital files.

ReDigi argued that from a technical standpoint, its process of transfer shouldn't be seen as making a reproduction because its system simultaneously causes packets of data to be removed from a consumer's computer as those packets are transferred.

Leval responds, though, that during the transfer, a new copy of the digital file is "fixed...for a period of more than transitory duration," and as such, the fixing creates a new phonorecord, i.e., a reproduction.

So much for the Right of First Sale, at least in this context. Copyright law is a "patchwork" (as Judge Leval calls It), a polite, appellate-level way of calling it a twisted mess of pre-digital-era artifacts that have resisted modernization thanks to legacy industry interference. There may be a path towards something more coherent, but those who can do something about it aren't really doing anything about it. From the decision [PDF]:

The copyright statute is a patchwork, sometimes varying from clause to clause, as between provisions for which Congress has taken control, dictating both policy and the details of its execution, and provisions in which Congress approximately summarized common law developments, implicitly leaving further such development to the courts.

[...]

Notwithstanding the purported breadth of the first sale doctrine as originally articulated by the courts, see BobbsMerrill Co., 210 U.S. at 350 (“[T]he copyright statutes, while protecting the owner of the copyright in his right to multiply and sell his production, do not create the right to impose . . . a limitation at which the book shall be sold at retail by future purchasers . . . .”); Bureau of Nat’l Literature v. Sells, 211 F. 379, 38182 (W.D. Wash. 1914) (finding no infringement, in light of first sale doctrine, where reseller rebound used books and held them out as new books),

Congress, in promulgating § 109(a), adopted a narrower conception, which negates a claim of unauthorized distribution in violation of the author’s exclusive right under § 106(3), but not a claim of unauthorized reproduction in violation of the exclusive right provided by § 106(1). If ReDigi and its champions have persuasive arguments in support of the change of law they advocate, it is Congress they should persuade. We reject the invitation to substitute our judgment for that of Congress.

This is about as unhelpful as the laws being discussed. Congress left it to the courts "for further development." The court is saying, "Take it up with Congress." That leaves the Right of First Sale ripe for further development but both Congress and the courts feel the other party should handle it.

ReDigi's case was never going to be the standard bearer for First Sale rights in the digital age. But it could have paved a path forward for better protections for consumers, allowing them to at least recoup some of what they've spent should a third party or rightsholder decide the stuff you paid for is no longer yours. Until that happens, digital media is worth less than the hardware storing it in terms of resale value.

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