By stealing some tank designs instead of using tank designs from an earlier C&C game. This is much worse than using a modified stock photo in ME3 because, while the stock photo was lazy, at least it was legal. This isn't, and Games Workshop are known for aggressively going after people who use their IP, even fan projects.
It's a possibility. But Games Workshop is a company that have decided that if you mod their IP into a game, the mod must be a total conversion and you must credit them: That's with a fan made mod being distributed for free. A policy they have send out cease and desist notices over. Them allowing EA to use two of their tank designs mixed in with another property, without credit being given to GW, seems out of character. Especially when THQ/Relic probably have exclusive rights to make 40k video games, meaning GW might not be able to give EA permission to use the tank designs.
Bunch of legal mumbo jumbo, if you ask me. Just goes to show how greedy people are, in general. Whatever happened to imitation being the highest form of flattery? XD
That becomes a problem when the imitation harms the person being imitated. For example, Person A spends a lot of their time writing a book and plans to sell it. Person B comes along, makes copies of the book and sells them claiming that he is the author and keeping all the proceeds. Person A did all the effort and Person B is harming him by denying him the revenue from his book sales. So there needs to be some protection against people imitating others. Games Workshop just takes it too far, like they are allergenic to good publicity*. As for this case, it's dealt with Which I translate as: - Some lazy artist copied the 40k tanks thinking nobody would notice. - Nobody at EA noticed. - EA are trying to spin this without admitting anything. - We aren't going to hear anything more about this from EA or GW. *This is a company who changed the miniatures to resin to make them cheaper to produce at the same time as they raised the prices.