Huge fail. You can't use the term space marines, because we stole the term 20 years ago from Heinlein...

I was thinking something similar. The film Aliens had Space Marines nearly twenty odd years ago. I would have thought that the combination of the two words is ridiculous as a trademark.

Those were Colonial Marines. Games Workshop produced a game, Space Hulk, at around that time.

As any reader of science fiction will know, the idea of future space marines is a staple of the genre and was commonly used by writers from the 1930s onward - well prior to the existence of Games Workshop and the creation of the Warhammer 40K setting. Examples include the space marines described by such sci-fi giants as E E "Doc" Smith and Robert A Heinlein*, plus others too numerous to list here.

But the suggestion that Games Workshop invented the idea of space marines - that nobody can write books about or otherwise use the idea of fictional troops called "space marines" without their consent - is ridiculous and the attempt to advance it is contemptible. The company is abusing its trademarks on the phrase - and indeed it doesn't actually appear to hold any mark covering electronic books. Amazon should have rejected GW's complaint out of hand, rather than complying with it.

Smith's marines were close combat troops of the Galactic Patrol, the spacegoing naval/law-enforcement organisation in which the Lensmen also served. Many people consider that the power-armoured interstellar soldiers of Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers were space marines, but the term wasn't used in that book - the "cap troopers" belonged to a force called the Mobile Infantry. However Heinlein did specifically refer to "space marines" in the novel Space Cadet and the short stories Misfit and The Long Watch.

Many people use the term "space marine" in reference to all science-fiction stories in any format which depict futuristic space-travelling close combat troops. Thus the Master Chief from Halo would be seen by some as being a space marine (much though his rank would suggest to US readers that he is actually a navy man), as would the Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers, the Colonial Marines in Aliens, the UNEF troops in The Forever War etc.