unforum

[diszaster]

Legal mumbo jumbo

[Nighthawk]

USER GENERATED CONTENT:

If you intend to make some sort of "anthology", I would *highly* recommend you get permission from those that wrote the content. I don't know if that's a legal requirement, but it would be highly recommended because some people simply might not want their stuff "out there".

LEGAL ISSUES:

The only times I've heard of that being a major issue is when the designers explicitly use someone else's copyright or intellectual property, without any effort to obscure it.

For example, if I went out and tried to make a Star Wars game, directly using names and elements from the Star Wars universe, LucasArts would come down on me like an anvil.

In my experience in independent game design, I've seen that happen more often than you can imagine.

PRIVACY:

I've had my thoughts on that as well. In the past I've had many signup pages, but I've questioned what exactly I can do with those.

For example, we've been considering a newsletter of some sort for RW... but we have 1100+ email addresses without any Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Those from here that signed up wouldn't have a problem with it I imagine, but it's the outsiders that might object to us mass mailing them that concern me.

And my concerns are not due to legal reasons; I just don't want to piss anyone off.

[pancito]

You might look at a Creative Commons license. It seems to fit the bill for what you are trying to do, given the limited amount of info you've given. Basically it provides protection to the extent that you want it to and allows use beyond 'fair use.' Cory Doctorow, for instance, releases some (all?) of his work that way so that readers can do things like translate his work into Burmese or whatever. We used Little Brother as the common book at my university this year, and since he has downloadable versions we didn't have to hassle with the bookstore never having enough copies of anything. I can recommend the book as well, and if you haven't read it you should. His website: http://craphound.com/ and http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

http://creativecommons.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

[diszaster]

Thanks for the really thoughtful responses. A lot for me to think about, but even just talking it out a little really helps.

@Nighthawk: Obviously I don't want to piss anyone off generally, but my thoughts start w/ legal issues as kind of a minimum standard or starting-off point for not pissing people off. I guess I'm kind of conflating legal issues with ethical/social ones. I'm grappling with the question "should I?" on top of "can I?" 

I'm definitely not going to be courting cease-and-desists from ppl like George Lucas. I'm more concerned that I might accidentally impinge on a player's right to his/her own intellectual property created in the course of play. God, I wasn't even thinking about mass emails & privacy rts when I posted; thanks for reminding me. :/

@pancito: Thanks for the book rec; that looks so up my alley. This shows my age, but I worked in traditional publishing before digital rights became a "thing." I think what might end up happening is a mixed system: I more tightly control the material I produce (not sure how tightly), but I request permission from players for the use of (edit, anthologize, make derivatives from) their works. Then whatever thing we jointly produce gets a warm and fuzzy cc license.  

Messy, isn't it?    

 I know I'm being pretty vague/general, but I think the closest analogy to what this project might look like is the A Million Penguins Project The final report is an interesting read even though the project sounds like a disaster. Their ToS is part of the reason I've been thinking about legal issues and ToS-es.