A quick heads up to the community: the German fan film, Damnatus: Der Feind Im Innern , has been leaked, in spite of GW's legal-jitsu.

A smart search of certain sites will net an .mp4 of the final cut. German audio, with english and german .srt files along with it. I'm refraining from mentioning the sites as, well, it's probably skirting the edge of the forum rules as-is, and it wouldn't be polite besides.

On a more relevant note- the plot would make a rather good campaign; or at the very least a scenario. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd have said that it had been written based upon someone's DH campaign.
A brief, fairly spoiler-free synopsis: a tech-priest, a couple of ex-Imperial Guardsmen and a noble (all mercenaries) are forcibly seconded by a PDF officer and an imperial psyker on the behalf of the Inquisition to search a section of the underhive for suspected cult activity, and to purge it if they find any. It all goes horribly wrong as they find a cult, but things are not as they first appear...

Watched it a few months ago. Absolutely loved it, though the Extreme High Collar early on put me ill at ease. Still a fan-quality production, but good one.

Alasseo said:

This is actually quite old now. The fan backlash around the legal/IP/German copyright law nightmare that the prospect of this films release became almost caused the internet to explode

Which is a shame as it is pretty good, especially for a fan made film.

If you've not seen it, take Alesseo's advice and check it out, it's worth it

Awesome! I was expecting it to be leaked not long after it got banned, and was naturally disapointed when it didn't. glad I'll finally get to watch it!

Yup, I was definitely following the film during the developement, even dropped the makers an e-mail or two of encouragement. It was really disappointing when GW put a stop to its distribution. From what I'm told they are able to crush enitre companies beneath the terrifying powers of their lawyers. So, I'm glad that I didn't download it from a torrent site last night, because I wouldn't be looking forward to watching it tonight.

yes naturally,

I mean I'm looking forward to watching it in 70 years when the rights expire.

Does anyone know if the crew behind it is now suffering any law suit? I could imagine our (german) law system and games-workshop (being the b**** that it is) hammering down on the poor folks really hard.

I believe they just got slapped with a cease-and-desist, and had GW confiscate 'every' copy of the film.

Personally, I didn't watch it, but I expected they tried their best, and that I'd like it.

I just watched it in a rather bad quality but was impressed none the less (it is about B movie in quality (like Mutant Chronicles IMO)).

Agmar_Strick said:

Well, Conan and Call of Chtulu should be free for anyone to use now but since they have become trademarks companies are able to keep control over them. Damnatus will probably never be legal to distrubute, and thank god for that. GW would never recover from the finacial blow of having a fan-made movie out there generating HUGE piles of money for the creators. Personally I don´t watch it for ideolocigal reasons. I think that GW should be able to control even our Dark Heresy campaigns so that no ambitious group tends to violate the brand by doing something unauthorized. Only official campaigns should be legal to play.

In fact, come to think about it, I think that the only place were you should be allowed to play GW-products are at the GW-stores. That way the chance of making something unauthorized is lessened. I also think there should be commissars in the GW-stores in uniform. Precisly like it is now when they follow you around, registering every move you make, always ready to act in case something needs remedy, but dressed in stormcoats and a cap.

For the record, I'm never one to defend evil megacorporations with a rep for screwing fans, but if I understand correctly, GW would have lost the exclusive rights to 40k had they allowed it to be published. I'd have moved to block in their position too.

That's pretty much it, thanks to German copyright law.

Interestingly, the press release GW made at the time said (IIRC) that while they loved what the Damnatus crew were doing, and had previously given the green light to the project, a new reading of german copyright law meant that if they allowed the project to be released without challenge, they would lose all rights to the intellectual property contained therein. They would have been happy to come to an arrangement with the Damnatus team which allowed the film to go ahead, and still retained their (GW's) droit morale , but that would have required them to keep track of and make similar agreements with the producers of every single fan film, and risk missing one and losing their rights to some obnoxious person who would start charging them royalties. As a result, it would be easier to simply introduce a blanket ban on fan films, and sue anyone who released one.

I'm not quite sure how they came to that conclusion- to me it suggests one or more of three things: (a) the people making the call were well intentioned, but had a poor understanding of german (b) the people making the call were well intentioned but had a poor understanding of law (specifically contract and copyright law) © the people making the call were part of the faction in the company that are concerned almost wholly with the bottlom line, with little or no regard for the fanbase.

I'd prefer to think it was (a) and/or (b), but...

Damnatus is impressive as a fan effort, but I think the Mutant Chronicles movie was a lot better.

/M