At the time of writing, I have not received any letter from them but there is of course a chance that this will happen.
The following is information I'm reasonably confident is true:
- Approximately 50 Cease and Desist letters were sent out at the end of October.
- NAF changed their domain name (from www.blood-bowl.net to www.thenaf.net)
- Talk Blood Bowl was asked to:
Immediately cease and desist from any activity which infringes GW's intellectual property.JohnnyP stated that he was closing down the site, but have since then implied that he will work with others to relaunch the site as soon as possible.
either remove remove your website or the reference to 'Blood Bowl' in your website name.
Remove the donations button from the page.
Confirm by return that you will not infringe GW's intellectual properly rights at any time in the future.
In addition to this, Tom Anders (member of the Blood Bowl Rules Committee, and manager of the MBBL and MBBL2 PBeM leagues) has been sent a letter requesting him to comply to GW's IP policy. He was asked to discontinue the use of the blood-bowl.net and bloodbowlfigs.com domain names, and is currently working on changing his sites to comply with these requests.
In addition to this, there's a bunch of information which is more rumour-like, with me being unable to verify the validity:
- The reason for this is a renewal of GW's trademarks. (GW's trademark for Blood Bowl was registered on 22 December 1998, with normal renewal time being 10 years).
- This is only targeting sites that use the Blood Bowl trademark in their site / domain names (all three confirmed sites have been using blood bowl in their domain names).
I will naturally keep you all updated on the matter when I receive any further information. Meanwhile, please remember to adhere to the rules on offensive language that we have on the site.
I am in contact with Tom Anders regarding this issue, and we're trying to find a way to get through this as well as possible.