BREAKING NEWS: GW now support mixing IPR!

[IBBoard]

For those who don't know, IPR is "Intellectual Property Rights" - basically copyright, trademark, patents and all associated laws that constrain what you can do with ideas, imagery and expression.

Theoretically, you need approval from the rights holder (e.g. GW) whenever you do anything extra with their IPR (write a story, create new chapters, draw your own pictures or otherwise do something other than use their content in their pre-approved ways).

GW are lax in some ways in that they'll let gamers talk about their own chapters or do conversions, but they've always been horrifically over-protective of their IPR when it comes to anything that isn't core gaming or mixes it with other worlds. Things like Hello Kitty! 40K are right out (although I won't complain in that specific case!), mainly because it a) doesn't fit in with the universe and b) needs approval from both rights holders (although GW didn't like it even if you could get the approval of the other rights holder). Until now...!

Games Workshop have an account on Twitter called VoxCaster. They occasionally retweet things from the community, and they recently implicitly condoned the mixing of IPR with this retweet (that's my tweet, but see the linked picture). Yes, that's right, GW retweeted an article about mixing Orks with Transformers to make Orktamus Prime - the combination of Games Workshop and Mattel's IPR!

Now that's something you don't see every day from the GW legal team...

(alternate image)