Sorry to jump in and try to get a last word on a debate that most are clearly well and truely over. Just page down if you don't care about legal argument (I am sympathetic).
Both sides in this particular copyright skirmish have left me unconvinced. Its precisely those ways in which adaptations differ from derivative works that is under issue (all adaptations are derivative works, its not clear that the converse is true in all cases). Frankly, despite the quoting of the various UK acts, I think you would have to be familiar with case law to make a useful judgement. For the benefit of US lawyers here, I'll just say I wouldn't trust the advice of a US lawyer on derivative works if they weren't familiar with the implications of the 'The Wind Done Gone' case, for example, and no one on either side of the debate has demonstrated anything like that level of familiarity with UK law. FWIW, I think Donald is wrong here, but only because I've looked into very similar specific questions myself for reasons unrelated to Glorantha. There is, for example, a whole body of specific law about whether fictional characters deserve copyright protection, which everyone on either side as has been treating as clearly one way or the other when its actually somewhat grey (I'm pretty satisfied most notable Gloranthan characters probably qualify, though).
Jeff Richard wrote:
>I hesitate to put much faith in
>a non-lawyer's interpretation of the law - especially when lawyers I've
>worked with before strongly disagree.
With all due respect to Jeffs legal judgement, I have found that the legal opinion of lawyers who are not specialists on copyright is often not that useful either. I am not a lawyer, nor any form of legal professional - but I have a keen interest in copyright law in a few specific areas, as a result of being both an amateur publisher involved in the copyright debate among small press publishers here, and a campaigner for specific areas of copyright reform (mostly via Electronic Frontiers Australia), and I have found that, for example, lawyers of my acquaintance who have done significant legal work in some commercial intellectual property areas such as trademark and trade secret are still completely unaware of major changes to Australian copyright law in the last few years. Similarly, standard legal advice to anyone involved in publishing from authors associations etc is that getting a legal opinion on a publishing contract from a lawyer who is not a specialist in the area actually does more harm than good, as the lawyers interpretations are often significantly misleading. Of course, getting a legal opinion from someone who is neither a specialist nor a lawyer is even worse, but I certainly no longer think a non-specialist lawyers opinion is necessarily helpful.
If someone really wants a definitive answer about a specific question, I think someone needs to ask a specialist in publishing law, or at very least a specialist copyright organisation (I use the very useful Australian Copyright Councils site at http://www.copyright.org.au quite a bit, but I am unaware of equivalents for other nations). In the absence of such advice, I humbly suggest both the lawyers and non-lawyers stop speculating about it.
More importantly, its all largely irrelevant. For either side, the exact legally enforceable limits of the policy will not be discovered until someone actually challenges it in court, which frankly would be most likely a very silly thing to do for a fun hobby with barely enough money involved to keep Issaries going. Bits of it are clearly a bit of a stretch. But it just doesn't matter. For the fans, we have rules to follow and we can lobby for changes privately if we want, with legal argument if we feel it helps and we have some idea what we are talking about. For Issaries, their rights are protected, and they have strong incentive to think very carefully and get independent legal advice before relaxing such protection.
There are problems with the fan policy, but they are public relations problems to do with confusion and unhappiness within the community. Issaries is doing what they can to resolve it, but public arguments about the legal nitty gritty from anyone, including well intentioned and sympathetic lawyers, isn't necessarily a help.
Cheers David ------------------------------
End of Glorantha Digest, Vol 11, Issue 138
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