Some folks seem to be expressing a concern that Issaries, based on the Fan Material Policy and the application for a formal or informal license, will be able to "steal" their work. If I read the policy, and the statements in Appendix D - the Submission Form, correctly this is not so. Issaries receives the right to use any names, places and concepts, but Issaries cannot use the whole, or substantially the whole work, without your agreement, i.e. Issaries my request to professionally publish the work, but you retain the right to refuse.
I suspect that one of the reasons that Issaries has published the Fan Material Policy in its current form (which may seem legalistic to some, but in my opinion is very gentle - it would not surprise me at all if Greg saw the first draft and then asked for it to be made more user friendly) is to determine where the copyright on much of Glorantha actually lies and to clear up any future ambiguity.
If I recall US copyright law correctly, prior to 1989 all work published in the US had to have a copyright statement attached for it to be copyrighted to the original author, otherwise it counts as being in the public domain. I suspect that much of what is now Gloranthan canon published prior to 1989 was done so without specific copyright statement attached, i.e magazine articles, convention books, freeform handouts, etc. Since 1989 it has been so that all work published is copyright the original author - which leads me on to my next comment.
Much Gloranthan work has been developed and written by groups of people, some of whom worked for Issaries and its predecessors, but many of whom did not. Copyright rests with the original author, unless copyright is assigned to someone else, or the author works for someone and the work was created as part of the employment, when the copyright automatically rests with the employer. I wonder where the copyright for much of the stuff published in Tales, Tradetalk and on websites lies? Much of this is now Gloranthan canon and published in Issaries books.
All the Fan Material Policy does, IMO, is clearly place the copyright for Glorantha (and its derivative works) with Issaries and clears up any ambiguity as to who owns the copyright to future Gloranthan work.
Finally, I would like to point out the concept of Fair Use. This allows anyone to make use of copyrighted material within certain guidelines. Amongst what is allowed are: discussion, commentary, critisism and parody. Actually, this covers a lot of what we do!! Stanford University has a good webite dealing with copyright and the concept of Fair Use (in the UK we have a similar concept - Fair Dealing) http://fairuse.stanford.edu
Anyway, just some thoughts that came to mind over the past couple of days.
Cheers,
Ed
Edward G McDonald
Founder and Managing Director
Trinity Group Limited
Tel: +44-20-7491-7555
www.trinity-group.co.uk
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