Editing ChapterHouse Studios (section)

====Fair Use====

[http://tsoalr.com/ Turn Signals On A Land Raider] was a web comic parodying WH40K, and hence was as quintessential an example of "'''Fair Use"''' as exists anywhere - Fair Use is the primary affirmative defense in copyright lawsuits (remember, it's an affirmative defense: You are arguing that even if the allegations in the suit are true, you are protected from liability; this means that you've been sued and are defending yourself in court with it, so you're playing with fire).  TSOALR was threatened by GW with a lawsuit, and it was making money - it had ads on its site - and was using WH40K IP to do so, so the lawsuit would not have been thrown out.  

Unfortunately, Fair Use has not been rigorously or objectively defined in any jurisdiction on the planet, so it's the judge's call, based on the case at hand and any relevant precedent.  TSOALR would still easily have won (parody is a subset of criticism, which is the most heavily enshrined kind of Fair Use), but it would have been expensive to do so (TSOALR would have needed to hire a defence lawyer, which needed money they didn't have). If you intend to protect yourself with Fair Use, familiarize yourself beforehand with the relevant cases you're going to claim as precedent and why you think it's fair use, and be prepared to shell out gobs of money to deal with GW shitting all over you.  TSOALR folded rather than go to court, and so we lost one of the mainstays of WH40K fandom (at least until 2018, when GW themselves went and ''hired the author'', so they could [https://www.warhammer-community.com/tsoalr/ officially revive it]).