Re: Re: Issaries Fan Policy

From: neil_at_...
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:53:28 +0000

David Dunham wrote:
>
> Trotsky
>
> >from my reading of the document, any web-page that you may be
> >considering posting to your site (or any significant changes to an
> >existing web-page that you already have), must be submitted to
Issaries
> >for approval, who then have the right to bar you from posting it.
>
> 2.E says that if it follows the guidelines, "it
> need not be submitted for approval." 3.A.1 says
> you have to make Issaries aware of the site. The
> informal license for many sites is granted in
> 3.A.1 (though perhaps Appendix A will modify
> this).
>

The problem is section 2C (Incorporation of Derivative Material), which says that any publication that substantially expands previous Proprietary Material, or any map of any area mentioned in Proprietary Material, must have permission from Issaries before publication.

It seems to me that posting messages to mailing lists, web forums (such as the Forge and RPG.net), Usenet groups, etc. is publication. It also seems to me that discussions here, such as the recent discussions of Carmanian Humakt, could easily count as Derivative material, and would therefore each posting on the topic would require explicit permission from Issaries before it can be made public.

I think that, to be safe, list moderators might have to consider making it policy that all posts need to be approved by Issaries, just in case they count as Derivative Material. Other fora may decide that allowing Glorantha/HQ discussion is too risky legally, so they may just ban it. Would Yahoogroups consider that, as the host of this list and keeper of the archives, they may get caught up in a legal tussle involving Issaries's IP and therefore decide to ban all such lists?

What about the archives of mailing lists? They're publically available, and there's no grandfathering in the policy, so it applies to the archives. I'm fairly certain that some postings will be Derivative Material. Who's going to go through all the archives, ensure that the original author seeks and receives permission (remember, their signature is required), and delete the posts where that isn't possible?

Even if things aren't that extreme, any posting on a Gloranthan subject to any public forum (e.g. the RPG.net forums) is going to require all the disclaimers be included in the posting. This is going to be a hassle, and may well end up stifling public discussion of Glorantha/ HeroQuest.

How are Issaries going to enforce this policy, especially on places like RPG.net? I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there a precedent that if someone doesn't enforce their IP rights in all arenas, their IP becomes vulnerable even where they do enforce their rights? If so, Issaries are going to have to spend a lot of time searching all the nooks and crannies of the net to find all relevant discussions.

Like John, I'm also concerned about the timeliness of the approval process. I imagine that Issaries are going to take quite a while to approve materials, considering how they're already very busy people without this additional workload. Are people going to put up with this, or are they going to put their talents to other use?

Yours skeptically,

Neil.

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