ChapterHouse Studios

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ChapterHouse Studios
Website	http://chapterhousestudios.com/

ChapterHouse Studios is a miniatures company that produces miniatures and bits meant to be used with Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy lines. Rather than dancing around the issue and saying "compatible with major brands of 28mm miniatures (wink, wink)", ChapterHouse's products are directly named and organized by what GW factions and models they're meant to go with.

Lawsuit from Games Workshop

GW chose to remove several units rather than let chapter house make a model for them. In otherwords, Gw cares more about hurting Chapterhouse than they care about having a quality tyranid codex.

Games Workshop got fed up with this and filed a lawsuit against them when they started making models for units that GW had named in their codexes but not depicted in any art or models, most notably the Tyranids' Mycetic Spore. The lawsuit went on for years, but finally ended mostly in ChapterHouse's favor -- since Games Workshop had never actually produced any depiction of many of the units in question, it was ruled that ChapterHouse (and anyone else) weren't violating any copyrights by making their own models (it would be like Games Workshop trying to bring a lawsuit against every person in the world who made conversions for Warhammer).

However on balance, GW took around 200 specific articles of alleged copyright infringement to court with them, and won about 30% of those. Forcing ChapterHouse to retire many of their own models, as simply making "variations" (such as female versions of existing GW models like Farseers & Aspect Warriors) still counts as infringment. Plus ChapterHouse was ordered to pay damages for these breaches of copyright and pay court costs, which they were still appealing as of early 2014.

Games Workshop took out their anger at the ruling on the Tyranids by stripping out the Mycetic Spores as well as the Doom of Mal'antai and the Parasite of Mortrex, which also had models made for them, and if the renaming of the Imperial Guard to the far more copyright-friendly "Astra Militarum", (not to mention the removal of several other ICs and units which never had models from their codex) is any indication, GW's lawyers are still bitter about it (though Games Workshop still love Space Marines too much to rename them, despite the 'Spots the Space Marine' situation). Of course, all of that could have been avoided if they were a little less lazy about giving characters both rules and models, but that would involve too much effort for them.

All in all, this is generally a good example of Intellectual Property Law at work: If you want to earn a profit by using someone else's IP, then you have to either have to License it from the owner (which GW won't give to competitors) or find a way to release original products that the owner has never released or depicted in the same media. Also, if the owner doesn't want to find someone filling a niche they themselves could be filling, then they shouldn't create gaps in their own product range.

Result

As of October 2014 Chapterhouse closed their doors after having their assets frozen by Games Workshop.

Despite all of the previous assumptions that Chapterhouse had "won" (based solely on the disparity of claims overturned vs claims upheld), it appears that Chapterhouse is no longer operating.

Admittedly, they should have seen it coming, since they based a huge portion of their business model as "aftermarket bits" specifically for GW products, which was an incredibly risky venture akin to playing with fire, especially considering that most people know how litigious GW is.

It is unknown at this time whether Chapterhouse will be able to re-open as an independent model producer and continue manufacturing their own ranges of product that have absolutely nothing to do with GW products. Only time will tell.

The earlier rulings regarding specific instances of infringment still stand; that GW cannot "own" a copyright on something that they have never depicted or produced themselves, so still don't expect the recent attitude of "no model = no rules" to lessen off any time soon.

Ultimately whether this is bad or good is up to you the reader, since it means that GW from now on will at least have models for the things that they present in their books rather than leaving giant gaps for over a decade (eg: Decapitator). The BIG downside is that you'll likely never find alternative parts for GW models anymore, meaning you'll have to go to them exclusively for your kit-bashing needs, unless you can find something in another product range that fits "coincidentally".

Also, (outside of tournament play) if you don't like GW models, you can always proxy someone else's models for those casual games since there now many competitors out there in the tabletop wargaming market.