arkansan
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 229
|
Post by arkansan on Nov 29, 2016 15:46:12 GMT -6
As I understand it (and I may be wrong) if you legally own the pdf (such as ones purchased over at RPGNOW) there is nothing wrong with uploading it to LULU printing your own copy and then taking it down without ever sharing the link. However, as far as I know, there are no legal pdfs of Chainmail. That's what I've heard as well. I'd gladly do this all myself if someone was to legally host the PDFs. On that note I find it surprising that WotC have not made available the pdf of Chainmail given that they have made OD&D available.
|
|
jacar
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 345
|
Post by jacar on Nov 29, 2016 17:29:43 GMT -6
On that note I find it surprising that WotC have not made available the pdf of Chainmail given that they have made OD&D available. They did a darned fine job of getting items to PDF at the "Classics" site but they've seemed to have lost steam. Not quite sure why. I would have expected Chainmail to be pushed out the door by now.
|
|
arkansan
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 229
|
Post by arkansan on Nov 29, 2016 17:48:55 GMT -6
If I had to hazard I guess I suppose it would be that Chainmail likely has a much smaller interest group than OD&D, I get the vibe that even around here few are using it in conjunction with their D&D games.
|
|
|
Post by krusader74 on Nov 29, 2016 19:09:32 GMT -6
I'm not sure who posted the Chainmail PDF on Lulu or why. Perhaps the best possible outcome is that it might jolt WotC (or whoever owns it) to republish it. But that's just wishful thinking... My inner pessimist tells me all of the consequences for doing this will be negative.Just to clarify, WotC used to sell PDFs of Chainmail through Paizo, etc. I legally purchased my Chainmail PDF on October 23, 2007 for $4. WotC halted all PDF sales in April 2009: So there are in fact legal PDFs of Chainmail out there -- just not for sale anymore. WotC justified halting all PDF sales because some idiot posted D&D 4E to scribd! So posting pre-0e to Lulu will not likely turn out good either!!! /begin rant For tangible goods, there's something called the First Sale Doctrine: So, for example, I can resell my paperback copies of the LBBs. Unfortunately, this doctrine does not apply to digital copies (PDFs, ebooks, mp3s, etc.), otherwise someone who legally purchased a Chainmail PDF prior to April 9, 2009 could sell it to someone else. The idea of abandonment applies to some kinds of property: If I don't use or maintain certain property for a long enough time, then it reverts to the public domain. For example, if you own a trademark and you don't use it in a commercial product for 7 years, then it reverts to the public, and someone else may claim it. This in fact happened recently to the Boot Hill trademark, which is now owned by Rogue Comet LLC -- see my post in the Boot Hill section. It would seem that even if WotC wanted to reprint Boot Hill, then they would have to license the name from Rogue Comet. Book titles are not covered by copyright, but it would seem that in this case, the book title is covered by trademark, which WotC abandoned! A few years back, there arose a similar situation with the AD&D trademark: It expired, someone else started using it, then WotC republished the AD&D rule books. My guess is that the party that started using the abandoned trademark did so without registering it, allowing WotC to get it back by registering it. In the case with Boot Hill, Rogue Comet beat WotC to the punch, and now legally owns the trademark. They may publish their own Boot Hill RPG, but they can't simply republish the original, because that would violate someone's copyrights (presumably WotC's). AFAIK, abandonment only applies to copyrights if the owner explicitly releases the work to the public domain. While the content of a game book may be copyrighted, game mechanics cannot be. According to the US Copyright Office in their publication on Games, fl-108: I've used this legal principle to justify my own Chainmail and Boot Hill retro-clones: It's ashame WotC (or whoever owns them) will not republish these books for an an affordable price. It may benefit the collector's market, but it also encourages piracy. Furthermore, WotC can't honestly claim to have lost revenue on these books due to piracy if they refuse to sell them... They can and will claim it, just not honestly. How much revenue exactly have they lost? Revenue is quantity times price, but there simply is no price if it's not for sale. Copyright terms (author's life + 70 years) are way too long. Originally, in the US, these were 14 years, renewable once for up to 28 years max. The intent was to allow publishers a chance to recoup their investment and to foster the arts. Now, the long terms really only serve rent-seeking behavior. Before copyrights, you had people like Bach and Mozart who created thousands of original works. Now, long terms actually stifle the arts, because someone who creates one success can borrow a lifetime+70 yrs worth of profits, and never have to work again. Additionally, copyright holders used to pay a fee to register their work with the library of congress: In other words, they had to pay to enforce their rights. Today, I pay (taxes) to enforce someone else's copyrights -- the big companies who own most of the rights pay no taxes -- they're free riders. So far as I know, Lulu is incorporated in Raleigh, North Carolina, and therefore is subject to NC State law and US federal law. Piracy here in the US is certainly a crime, with heavy fines and a draconian jail term. But to say it's unethical requires some kind of ethical framework and argumentation. The ethics of copyrights are a separate issue from the legalities, unless you're a social contractarian, in which case ethics is totally artificial and rights are created by contracts and law. The problem for contractarianism is that if another society lacks copyright law, then there's no basis for criticizing them, or claiming they're "pirating" your work. Other theories of ethics (divine command, Kantianism, utilitarianism, virtue theory) each have their own opinions. /end rant
|
|
|
Post by Stormcrow on Nov 29, 2016 19:26:17 GMT -6
So you're against things like eBay then.. A place where people buy something for one price and charge over 100 times its original worth a few years later and make way more profit off of it than the store, or the original creators did? Ebay sells physical product. You can legally sell a hunk of paper with ink patterned across it. You can't legally sell the rights to intellectual property that doesn't belong to you. Yes, it's thievery. The owner of intellectual property has the right to withhold that property from publication. They have the right to choose its form and distribution of publication. The owners of the Ghostbusters license would doubtless disagree with the idea that someone can freely distribute their intellectual property. What if they want to grant that license to a company to make a new Ghostbusters game? The situation is very different if they have to compete with PDFs of the old West End Games version; said company may feel it can't compete and would be unable to make up in sales the cost of the license. Whether you make a profit is irrelevant. Whether the publication is out of print is irrelevant. Whether the company that originally published it is out of business is irrelevant. Whether you think anybody is hurt by it is irrelevant. If you don't own the intellectual property or have a license to it, you can't publish it, including distributing PDF files. That's illegal.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2016 22:44:17 GMT -6
"It's not available" does not change the legality of the issue in the slightest. Thievery is thievery no matter how you try to obfuscate the issue. As somebody who has had his writing published, yeah, I take this d**n seriously. So you're against things like eBay then.. A place where people buy something for one price and charge over 100 times its original worth a few years later and make way more profit off of it than the store, or the original creators did? I really don't think that publishing a PDF from what looks to be a personal collection is thievery, considering they wouldn't be making any money off of the sale. People host free PDFs all the time, I really don't see the issue. These are out of print games, ones that likely won't see the light of day in any actual republication. For example the West End Games ghostbusters RPG and all of its supplements are for free online in PDF form. I could download them and get them printed for the same that it would cost me to get the books mentioned in this thread. But that's not thievery. You're so far from right, you aren't even wrong. The US Copyright Law gives you complete permission to make copies for personal use. It specifically prohibits the owner of an article from distributing copies. Out of print or not, if a person posts a PDF that they do not own the rights to, that is illegal. And those who take copies of it are guilty of theft. That really is all there is to it. There is no "new legality of the cyber age," there is simply theft made easy.
|
|
jacar
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 345
|
Post by jacar on Nov 30, 2016 15:05:39 GMT -6
So, for the record, copyright is quite muddled in the US. I believe it is 28 years with an optional renewal period of up to 67 years, depending on when the work was first published. For example, Edgar Rice Buroughs John Carter/Barsoom series would probably be public domain by now. It was first published in 1909. There was a 28 year copyright notice. If ERB renewed it, there would be another 28 year term based on the law at the time. So 56 + 1917 puts the first book out of copyright in 1974, just two years before the law was updated. The books are public domain and you can get copies for free on Amazon as well as the internet archive. (archive.org) Warriors of Mars was published in 1974. The ERB estate got them to pull/not publish the book anymore. It has been released into the public domain and also resides at archive.org. You can still buy originals for an arm and a leg if you so desire.
The notion that a work is out of print and therefore is "free" is a flawed notion. If the copyright notice has not expired, then making copies for distribution for monetary gain or not is quite illegal under US copyright law.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2016 19:00:04 GMT -6
Not to mention SOME Barsoom books are in public domain, and others are NOT.
And there is Disney as a prime example of letting NOTHING go out of copyright.
|
|
|
Post by geoffrey on Nov 30, 2016 21:08:12 GMT -6
t looks to me like someone uploaded these for printing a personal copy and simply didn't set it to private. I suspect you are right. If you overlook checking a single box making the document you upload to lulu private, it will be available to everyone.
|
|
|
Post by smubee on Dec 1, 2016 1:32:30 GMT -6
Warriors of Mars was published in 1974. It has been released into the public domain and also resides at archive.org. You can still buy originals for an arm and a leg if you so desire. Sweet! Thanks for the information.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2016 12:56:58 GMT -6
TSR's WARRIORS OF MARS game is NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN!
|
|
|
Post by smubee on Dec 1, 2016 13:47:24 GMT -6
TSR's WARRIORS OF MARS game is NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN! If it's on archive.org (which it is) then it is in the public domain, as from what I can tell.. You can ONLY upload something if you own the copyright to it, or if it is in public domain.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2016 19:52:00 GMT -6
How is this enforced? How large a staff of copyright lawyers does Archive.Org have?
Or do they say "do not upload unless you own the copyright," which would stop somebody for approximately 1 femtosecond.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2016 20:00:17 GMT -6
Never mind, I found and read the terms of service.
It is an honor system. There is no honor among thieves.
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Dec 2, 2016 5:01:58 GMT -6
Same thing with SCRIBD and other file hosting/sharing sites. They all say "be sure it's legit" but those places are full of pirated files.
As to WARRIORS OF MARS, I would think that its status would be particularly complex due to the fact that Gary was forced to stop printing and selling them in the 1970's due to the ERB estate so even if Gary's rights (or TSR's or whoever's) had expired the litigation imposed by the ERB estate might still hold and forbid reprinting the book. I can't see that WoM would have a simple ownership right associated with it.
|
|
jacar
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 345
|
Post by jacar on Dec 2, 2016 10:49:57 GMT -6
TSR's WARRIORS OF MARS game is NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN! You can't claim to have intellectual property rights on something that in turn violate intellectual property rights of another work or body of work. So there is the rub. Even if WotC wanted to complain, they would not have a leg to stand on. BTW, it's been on Archive.org since 2011 and nobody even batted an eye. In a Google search, it is the second entry. I am certain WotC is well aware as they have folks who go searching for illegal copies of their products. If it hasn't been taken down by now, it likely won't be. The reason is probably because they do not have that right.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2016 18:58:16 GMT -6
NONE of which alters the fact that it is an illegal PDF. Doesn't matter if the copyright belongs to TSR or ERB or whoever.
It is NOT a legal thing to download or distribute.
|
|
|
Post by Stormcrow on Dec 2, 2016 20:02:06 GMT -6
There are tons of things on archive.org that are there illegally. Their presence there, for however long, doesn't make them legal. Someone not doing something about them doesn't make it legal, nor does it mean they're actually legal after all and we just don't know it.
People on the Internet believe the most outrageous things about copyright.
|
|
jeff
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 108
|
Post by jeff on Dec 2, 2016 22:21:12 GMT -6
As I understand it (and I may be wrong) if you legally own the pdf (such as ones purchased over at RPGNOW) there is nothing wrong with uploading it to LULU printing your own copy and then taking it down without ever sharing the link. However, as far as I know, there are no legal pdfs of Chainmail. I have several things on Lulu that are private. No one can order them but me. And they are copyrighted items I have purchased legally (the 3 LBBs + Greyhawk, for example). I have never had a problem getting those printed, but since they are private, no one else can print them.
|
|
|
Post by Vile Traveller on Dec 2, 2016 23:03:24 GMT -6
Law, huh. Can't live with it, and can't live with it. Best ignore it until it goes away.
|
|
|
Post by magremore on Dec 3, 2016 7:05:36 GMT -6
TSR's WARRIORS OF MARS game is NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN! I am certain WotC is well aware as they have folks who go searching for illegal copies of their products. If that's the case, those folks are doing a pretty bad job, lol.
|
|
|
Post by tdenmark on Dec 3, 2016 13:28:48 GMT -6
I am certain WotC is well aware as they have folks who go searching for illegal copies of their products. If that's the case, those folks are doing a pretty bad job, lol. When I published my first RPG books within weeks they started popping up on illegal download sites. For 6 months I battled the pirates on a daily basis. Every day I'd find books illegally hosted, it got to the point where it cost me more in lost time fighting them than it was worth. So to say those folks are doing a "pretty bad job" is unfair. The only solution is for decent people to refuse to participate in anyway with this kind of behavior. That means DON'T DOWNLOAD PIRATED FILES!
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2016 14:04:51 GMT -6
Good point. The internet is too d**n big to police effectively, and Hasbro has more lucrative things to spend their lawyers' time on.
|
|
|
Post by krusader74 on Dec 3, 2016 14:16:39 GMT -6
As to WARRIORS OF MARS, I would think that its status would be particularly complex due to the fact that Gary was forced to stop printing and selling them in the 1970's due to the ERB estate so even if Gary's rights (or TSR's or whoever's) had expired the litigation imposed by the ERB estate might still hold and forbid reprinting the book. I can't see that WoM would have a simple ownership right associated with it. This got me thinking... There were a few times when Gary Gygax himself ran afoul of intellectual property law: - Warriors of Mars (1974) got published without the permission of the Burroughs estate, and soon after its release they issued a cease and desist order and the game was pulled from the market.
- References to creatures from JRR Tolkien's books went into D&D (1974) without permission, and in later printings got renamed due to the threat of legal action:
- Hobbits to Halflings
- ents to treants
- balrogs to Type VI demons (balors)
[/ul][/li][li]References to the the Cthulhu Mythos in Deities & Demigods (1980): While some Lovecraftian materials were public domain (PD), others were still owned by Arkham House.[/li][li]References to the Melnibonéan Mythos in Deities & Demigods (1980): This one is a little complicated too... My understanding is that Moorcock gave his permission to Gygax to use this material, but not before giving Chaosium the licensing rights. To avoid a lawsuit, Gygax halted printing of the book and inserted credit to Chaosium in the second printing. But the entire section was removed from the second edition (1981) of the book.[/li][/ol] Fortunately, at least the other 10 pantheons of gods from myth and folklore in Deities & Demigods (1980) were PD. Unfortunately, nothing created since Mickey Mouse(TM) ever reverts to the PD. I still treasure my original copy of Deities & Demigods (1980) with its "illegal" Melnibonéan and Lovecraftian sections! I'm sure it was costly for Gygax to pull WoM from the market and to halt printing of D&DG. Costly yes, but not absurd: ( NB. $75T is about 150% of the entire world's combined GDP! More money than exists in the entire world!!!) And at least Gygax's violations were settled out of court -- nobody went to jail. Today, he might go to jail for 5 years. You might claim that posting CM, WoM, etc. to Lulu or Scribd or Archive.org is somehow worse than any of Gygax's four violations listed above. And these four violations all seem like fair use to me. But that's a matter of opinion -- clearly, ERB's estate, Tolkien's estate, Arkham House, and Chaosium felt otherwise, or else they wouldn't have bothered to threaten TSR with lawsuits. Today, books are literally turning into dust while lawyers argue over who owns them, and they may be erased from history before anyone may legally make copies of them. At various other places and times in history, books have been declared "illegal" and copying them outlawed -- hundreds of Gospels, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Torah and Talmud -- and none of these books would even exist today if it weren't for "piracy." Everything you view in your web browser is a "copy." Every idea you have is a "derived work," shaped by all the ideas that came before it: More absurdity: - Digitized books, music and videos are just binary numbers, and so laws against copying digitized materials have the side-effect of creating illegal numbers -- numbers you are not allowed to possess or communicate.
- I could write a computer program that enumerates all strings up to a given length: a, aa, ab,..., zz, aaa, aab,... It would take a long time, but eventually, it would generate every book: Not simply every actual book, but every possible book (of some huge but finite length). Enumerating every possible book (of a given length or less) is easy, but it would take a long time. A more efficient approach would be to write an AI that writes books. Back in the early 1990s, Selmer Bringsjord began the Autopoiesis Project at RPI which begat BRUTUS, the Storytelling Machine. BRUTUS could write short stories. This year, an AI-written novella almost won a literary prize. That's a lot of progress in 25 years. Soon, AI systems will displace human writers (and game makers!); and the big corporations that can afford fast machines and smart AI algorithms will rapidly accumulate the intellectual property rights to every story anybody will ever want to read and every game anybody will ever play, concentrating too much wealth in too few hands, and not leaving much space for human creativity. Big Pharma is already using AI to discover and patent new drugs.
I am NOT advocating piracy or any other kind of law breaking, but I do think today's copyright laws are too archaic, copyright terms too long and penalties too stiff. Sensible reform is badly needed. We need more fair use exceptions, not fewer. We need to expand the public domain, not shrink it. Besides the four cases listed above, there are probably other cases where early TSR material violated other people's copyrights and trademarks. Can anybody think of more examples???
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2016 19:10:00 GMT -6
When discussing Warriors of Mars, it is vitally important to remember context. I'm going to quote myself on another forum:
"Let's set the WAYBAC machine to the mid 1950s. Lionel Trains is in its glory. However, they don't pay royalties to any railroads. In fact, the railroads happily send Lionel paint chips, lettering diagrams, and striping charts so they get it all right. Because every bright shiny red and silver Lionel "Santa Fe" F-unit is a living, breathing ad for the Santa Fe, and don't you forget it.
And nobody said "Boy Lionel sure is ripping the Santa Fe off and getting rich." People frankly didn't think like that.
A few years later we get Star Trek fandom. Though SF fandom and fan fiction had been around for years, Star Trek in the late 60s and early 70s turned the trickle into a deluge. Every Star Trek con had heaps of mimeoed Star Trek fan fiction magazines for sale, usually for cost plus a dribble extra. And Gene Roddenberry looked upon it and saw that it was good, because he knew that the only bad publicity is no publicity.
Meanwhile in the wargaming world. (NB - by "wargaming" I mean "miniatures wargaming" but that's too much to type every time). The wargaming hobby had, frankly, no money in it. The fact that Don Lowry wanted to hire Gary Gygax to work for Guidon Games means that Guidon was one of the Movers and Shakers of the World. Most wargame "companies" were more like Jack Scruby, who used the income from his day job to help keep his wargame magazine and his wargame miniatures line going. (Sounds familiar, doesn't it...) This was a hobby of garage manufacturers. By Rob Kuntz's recollection, which is usually pretty darn good, the first edition of CHAINMAIL was 200 copies. At $2 each that's a GROSS revenue of $400, BEFORE we pay the printer or give any dealer discounts. Woo hoo. Even in 1970 that's not much.
And since wargaming became a hobby instead of a training for military officers, wargamers had been writing rules based on what was handy.
H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars using Britains figures and guns. And he, nor anyone else, thought about writing for Britians for permission.
Fletcher Pratt wrote a set of naval wargame rules for warship models available at the time, and nobody ever thought about asking the model makers for permission.
When plastic model WWI airplanes became available, Mike Carr wrote "Fight in the Skies," and nobody ever suggested he should have written to Hawk or Monogram or Aurora.
When Roco started making 1/87 size tanks Mike Reese wrote "Tractics" and nobody ever thought he should ask permission of Roco (or Krupp, for that matter.)
So in 1972, Lou Zocchi published the "Star Trek Battle Manual," because the AMT models were available and Star Trek fan fiction was popular. But we wargamers didn't want to write, or read, stories about Captain Kirk falling in love with Lieutenant Mary Sue. We wanted to protect the Federation from the perfidious Klingoni menace.
Because, you see, wargame rules are fan fiction for wargamers.
I'll say that again. Wargame rules are fan fiction for wargamers.
The "Star Trek Battle Manual" is Star Trek fan fiction for wargamers. TRACTICS is WW2 tank combat fan fiction for wargamers. Fight in the Skies is WW1 airplane combat fan fiction for wargamers. And the Uruks, Ents, Balrogs, and Hobbits of the CHAINMAIL fantasy supplement are Tolkien fan fiction for wargamers. And "Warriors of Mars" is Barsoom fan fiction for wargamers.
To us at the time they looked no different.
And because there was no money in it, these games might have stayed under the radar and unnoticed. But then along came D&D.
In January 1974 D&D came out. Sales only 2 years later... 1976... were some $300,000. This was an explosion. Not only that, but at Origins 1976 the D&D tournament had 250 entrants -- a full order of magnitude greater than any other game. When most events had 15 to 20 participants, 250 for one game was phenomenal. In the 2 1/2 years from launch to Summer 1976, D&D went from unknown to dominating the wargame world.
Naturally, it attracted attention... but not all of it good. Once D&D began to get known, we know what happened next.
In a way, it's kind of sad; the hobby-driven, fanfic-for-wargamers days were a lot of fun in some ways, and it certainly was a much more innocent time.
I've got a chapter on this in my upcoming book, of course. I think my ending sentence for that chapter works here too, referring to the aftermath of that Origins and the Burroughs and Tolkien C&D orders:
"The First Age had ended." "
|
|
|
Post by derv on Dec 3, 2016 20:14:38 GMT -6
Well, this may be looking at Gygax et al. actions from a bubble. I won't go into a lot of detail here, but the 70's was a time when we saw a rise in behavior that is best exemplified and expressed by Abbie Hoffman's book entitled, "Steal This Book", which was published in, uh guess when, 1971. We saw the expansion and somewhat accepted practice of bootlegging recordings of popular bands. In the 80's these would become cassette tapes with cheap photocopied sleeves. Many punk rock bands epitomized this practice as a way of getting their name and music out. Hand in hand, a growing underground publishing network was spreading as a means of sharing politics, music, comics, and other counter culture subjects. Copy right infringement was occurring willy-nilly and purposefully. So, it wasn't just happening with miniature rules. People understood that what they were doing was questionable. And ultimately the blow back should have been expected. But hey, screw the man
|
|
|
Post by mrmanowar on Dec 3, 2016 22:51:35 GMT -6
I don't have a horse in this race. While I own a Guidon Chainmail and have seen Warriors of Mars multiple times (actual hard copies), I understand both sides of the issue. On the one hand, there is the need and I emphasize need to protect copyrights and such, I can also see the demand for said product. However, if WOTC owns the rights for these titles, (And WoM is complicated due to cease and desist TSR got), I will wait on them. I did buy the OD&D box set not so much for the reprinted stuff since I had copies of the originals I collected over the years, it was to show them that "Hey, I spent money on this, please reprint more!". Being honest here, I don't know that I would ever play Warriors of Mars. It's a fun nice historical anecdote for me. Mainly due to the controversy. Same goes for the Tolkien ones on the woodgrain/white box D&D sets.
The real issue here is how the IP is handled. This has lasting repercussions for the living people who originally played this stuff. As some, Gronan included are writing books that I will gladly spend top dollar to buy may be at risk. Going back to the "cease and desists" TSR got to the future (Some KS's I backed about D&D Documentary(s)).... I may not get what I paid for as far as product goes. At the end of the day I just wish everyone put their "big boy" pants on and realizes that no one is gonna get rich on this material BUT there is demand for it and that product gets released in an official way whereas the distributors of said material gets paid and the consumers get a good value on the money they sent. Just my two electrum pieces.
|
|
|
Post by Finarvyn on Dec 4, 2016 6:42:05 GMT -6
Gronan makes exactly the point I had intended to make that the early days of gaming were very different. TSR isn't the only group to use someone else's IP in their games early on, because we all did it in our home games and it just made sense to share materials as we used them instead of having to disguise them. If anyone even thought about IP and the estates we probably would have assumed that they would have appreciated the free publicity which would have led to more folks reading their books.
And with all of the issues that TSR had with certain IP and certain estates, he still included those books in his Appendix N. That says something, too, as I suspect a lot of folks would have gotten vindictive and removed them from his list.
|
|
|
Post by derv on Dec 4, 2016 11:36:08 GMT -6
Gronan makes exactly the point I had intended to make that the early days of gaming were very different. TSR isn't the only group to use someone else's IP in their games early on, because we all did it in our home games and it just made sense to share materials as we used them instead of having to disguise them. If anyone even thought about IP and the estates we probably would have assumed that they would have appreciated the free publicity which would have led to more folks reading their books. This is the same argument of naivety that people are ranting about here with the pdf's on the internet. I personally do not accept these assumptions of justification for TSR. As I pointed out above, this sort of behavior was a negative cultural attitude at the time. WoM was published in 1974 and the ERB estate issued a C&D early 1975. TSR was simply flying under the radar prior to this. Yet, TSR continued to push the boundaries of IP. And, by 1976 they are throwing C&D's on others. We then have the Tolkien estate issuing C&D orders in 1977. I'm sure people appreciate this generous opinion of Gygax's actions. There is another way of looking at this, though, that isn't as generous.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 4, 2016 14:37:20 GMT -6
I'm sure people appreciate this generous opinion of Gygax's actions. There is another way of looking at this, though, that isn't as generous. WHICH says nothing about Gary, but says a LOT about you.
|
|