US Games has sued various entities and won, mostly in the 1970s. None of those cases were recent enough to refer to/clarify the reasoning they are currently depending on for their copyright claim.
US Games owned a US copyright for the RWS that probably lasted until the mid 80's (see again the
Sacred Sites). For the current situation it would be interesting to see if they won any court cases past that time in the US, that means for the orignial cards and images, not for the US Games alterations.
Nice work trzes. From what I understand, US Games has also trademarked the title Rider-Waite as an added protection. That implies to me that they're trying to find ways to protect their IP beyond copyright expiration. That can be both a good practice and a bad practice.
In the RWS case I find their practice rather dodgy. They used whatever might work
somehow to justify their own copyright, only to cover the fact that the copyright for the actual thing, the tarot deck itself, would expire soon. They removed the nice handwritten titles by Pam and replaced them with their own typeface, only to claim their own copyright for it. The box has it's own copyright, and even the title "Rider Waite Tarot" has been trademarked.
"Rider" only refers to the original English publisher (well, leaving Waddingtons out of it...) - nothing more.
True indeed. And it makes it even more dodgy to claim a trademark for the name of an already existing publisher. Or did US Games maybe own Rider or at least the name at the time?
Then again, I wonder if pressure to acquire a license from them can be anything more tangible than a psychological effect? An average person getting letters from companies and lawyers of barely comprehensible legalese threatening all sorts of legal action would be scared into submission. But if you ignore those threats, you force the company to either go to court or ignore you. If the work is really in the public domain then it's not in their interests to actually go to court since they are selling licenses so if the work has been in the public domain for a number of years they might face all sorts of action from licensees for doing that.
I guess a lawyer in the US or UK who wants to make a name for themselves could take on a case and break a monopoly with little personal expense and big fame gain. Just saying.
Both sides have a sort of asymmetrical risk here, it seems. If US Games goes to court and looses they can forget the next (and final) seven years of good profit with RWS products. If they win they only get a few more license fees. If on the other hand we (the poor tarot enthusiasts) go to court and loose, then we are in trouble because of the costs of the court case. If we win we can publish or own RWS and will probably fail to make profit anyway.
But they are big and we are small, so they can scare us with letters full of law-alike blurb, while we can hardly scare them. Anyway, no matter how much I complain, I wouldn't take the risk of a court case in Europe myself because of my lack of reliable information to predict the outcome with certainty. As for the US I simply don't know what trouble a court case would imply even if the case is crystal clear. The best chances for us would be to rely on the prediction that US Games wouldn't go to court, neither in the US nor in Europe. But how sure can we be?