<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, ‘Lucida Grande’, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 1em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: #000000;”>anyone who would know: Do you think that printing blank white styrene cards with punchable ship and crew templates <span style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: underline;”>without</span> the branding and set name would violate the patent(s)? I assumed so because ideally the design itself would be identical, but it’s intriguing to think about. <em style=”border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;”>(such as a very simple no-name box of 3 masted ship cards all white with no associated info to the old game)</p>
<p style=”border: 0px; font-family: ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, ‘Lucida Grande’, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 1em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: #000000;”>This actually might have reasonable potential as a stopgap measure if the legal stuff never resolves itself, but those same legal issues could be what dooms it in the first place.</p>
I have no idea how things would actually fall legally, but unless you got their dies somehow and made exact copies, and then sold them using their artwork and under the Pirates name, it’s probably not going to be a big issue. It would depend mostly on what specifically they have patented/copyrighted/trademarked, but if you came up with their own dies and made your own generic buildable pirate ships that just happened to be a similar scale, you’d probably be fine. There always seems to be a lot of wiggle room when you carefully avoid the specifics of a patent, even when it’s an obvious emulation – but that’s something you’d need a lawyer to figure out.
Regardless, the dies are probably still the biggest hurdle, because if you can’t find a way to get those made and set up on a production line, it doesn’t matter whether the rest is legal or not.
In a more general sense, stickers are still the best bet. That’s a simple method that you could employ right now, and as long as you aren’t selling them for profit, WK/NECA/etc. isn’t likely to even look twice at it. If you good through the files section on BGG for almost any popular or high-ranked game, you’ll see tons of fan-created custom materials that are no more or less copyright-infringing than new deckplate stickers would be. Create a set, upload them as PDFs, and anyone else who owns the game can print them and stick them on the stuff they already own.