So I Accidentally Made a Freelancer Wargame...

[romeodarkbeat]

I wasn't trying to advertise selling these. I'm not even sure how practical or legal that would be...

Depends on your country laws really, and of course Microsoft won't be too happy about it but if it's small scale replicas and a map and not a full-blown game with Freelancer branding all over it, you should be free from harm under what version of fair use and transformative work. That's how all those anime figurines are built btw, not by the copyright owners themselves but by licensed or small time assemblies protected by fair use is in effect in your territory.

quote

In United States copyright law, transformation is a possible justification that use of a copyrighted work may qualify as fair use, i.e., that a certain use of a work does not infringe its holder's copyright due to the public interest in the usage. Transformation is an important issue in deciding whether a use meets the first factor of the fair-use test, and is generally critical for determining whether a use is in fact fair, although no one factor is dispositive. Transformativeness is a characteristic of such derivative works that makes them transcend, or place in a new light, the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable. Such transformativeness weighs heavily in a fair use analysis and may excuse what seems a clear copyright infringement from liability.

In United States patent law the term also refers to the test set in In re Bilski: that a patent-eligible invention must "transform a particular article into a different state or thing".

Microsoft is based on the US and if you are too you are bound to the same laws as they are. And they never assembled any physical model about Freelancer. To make FL2 would be one thing, a total breach of their IP, but a Storta Model for instance is something so derivative and such transformed from the original source material that the 3D models might aswell be an IP on it's own (someone tell that to devs and modelers pelase).

So printing and selling some of them, specially new ones, shouldn't be much of a problem. Of course, I'm not an american lawyer so you might want to check the fine details with one.

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