Hello fellow indiehackers!
A friend and I want to create a web based Warhammer 40k roster builder. The rights to Warhammer are owned by Games Workshop and they are very protective of their intellectual property. The current most popular roster builder is Battlescribe, https://www.battlescribe.net/. This tool uses open source data that lives here https://github.com/BSData/wh40k.
We would like to take a similar approach for our tool. We would point users to a community driven public repo of data for the tool. No Games Workshop data would live on our server. Instead, the tool would load that data into the browser and build the roster from there.
My concern is despite us not packaging any data with the tool, the public repo holding crowd sourced data will still be infringing on GW's IP. We are trying to avoid any legal troubles so we looked over https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Intellectual-Property-Policy?_requestid=1644013 and https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/. At first glance, it would appear that GW could submit a request to have the data from Github removed. But if that is the case, why have they not done it to Battlescribe which has been around for years? Without easy to use data, our tool is pretty useless.
I appreciate any thoughts and suggestions!
Well... I'm not a lawyer but If you are going to use their proprietary without any permission they can ask you to close everything at any time.... Plus if you become too popular or too big in the future, they are almost obligated to protect their trademark....
Thanks for the response. Yea that was my concern as well. There used to exist a web based tool but it got shut down. It was getting like 40k hits a day. However, it also copied text and images straight from GW website which we do no intend on doing.