Story hour publishing and copyright issues

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Then, even if I catch all the names, there's a chance someone could notice plot elements and pick up on that what happens in the Place of Basic Badness is somewhat like what happens in the Temple of Elemental Evil. Friggin' hell.

You may be safe on plot elements as long as the writing isn't copied, since an adventure isn't a plot per se. Most of one of Elizabeth Moon's Deeds of Paksennarion books is an almost direct lift of the Village of Hommlet module, and I don't think anyone ever made a big deal of it.

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

Definitely. Almost nobody will these days; if they rejected someone's submission and published something similar a few years later, they'd be vulnerable to lawsuits even if it was a case of independent origin. The way to avoid that is to have a policy of never even looking at unsolicited submissions.

Yup, and WoTC also has to protect their IP in regards to the content of any novels or short stories they publish. They are very careful, as they should be, to not damage the story lines of their various characters and campaign settings.

I remember reading on the WoTC boards a few years ago some guy had posted a thread about having submitted a short story to WoTC and it got rejected. He posted the story in the thread. The story was set in the Forgotten Realms, and it included Elminster. The story was basically the author's character, a female drow mage-thief -possibly assassin, curb stomping Elminster the main character climbed on a tree and hid. Elminster, strolling through the woods, as all powerful mages do, gets surprised and totally owned by the author's character. Fortunately Elminster was able to get away from this mighty drow of awesome-sauce assassin.

I'm guessing that WoTC generally has an idea of what they want and don't want in a story. Accepting unsolicited works makes it much harder for them to control the direction they want a particular kind to go in. Could you imagine if that drow curb stomping Elminster story for published? What would that have some to the FR line of novels and products? It's an easy way to damage the IP.

 

[Umbran]

Then, even if I catch all the names, there's a chance someone could notice plot elements and pick up on that what happens in the Place of Basic Badness is somewhat like what happens in the Temple of Elemental Evil. Friggin' hell.

Ah, but *plot* is not covered by copyright. Only the specific expression thereof.

 

[Dr Midnight]

IIIIII'm pretty sure taking the plot of a story and putting it out with only names changed is still actionable.

 

[Morrus]

IIIIII'm pretty sure taking the plot of a story and putting it out with only names changed is still actionable.

Don't confuse "plot" with "text". You can take the plot of something and reuse it ( indeed many argue that only very few plots exist). You can't use the words they used though. You have to use your own words.

So you can write about a group of adventurers going on a journey to slay a dragon. Indeed, many have.

 

[Dr Midnight]

many argue that only very few plots exist.

These are the same people who will tell you that "there are only two types of people in the world." They oversimplify and they must be stopped.

So you can write about a group of adventurers going on a journey to slay a dragon. Indeed, many have.

Yeah, but you can't write (fill in plot of Star Wars here, change the names and dialogue) and expect to skate. I'm no legal guy but I'll betcha that wouldn't work out too well.

 

[Morrus]

These are the same people who will tell you that "there are only two types of people in the world." They oversimplify and they must be stopped.


Yeah, but you can't write (fill in plot of Star Wars here, change the names and dialogue) and expect to skate. I'm no legal guy but I'll betcha that wouldn't work out too well.

Farm boy and wizard recruit a pirate and travel to the evil wizard's castle to rescue a princess?

Sure you can. As long as you use your own words.

 

[Dr Midnight]

That's not the plot, though, that's the... I dunno what the term is for that, but plot isn't just a vague blurb sentence. A plot is the ordered collection of events relevant to a story, and that's what I'm pretty sure you can't duplicate with just name and dialogue changes.

 

[Janx]

Farm boy and wizard recruit a pirate and travel to the evil wizard's castle to rescue a princess?

Sure you can. As long as you use your own words.

Yup. Heck that movie with that boy who rode dragons based on a book that was written by a teenager was a blatant rip off of Star Wars.

Totally legal.

You can write an outline of the star wars novel, and then use different names for people and places and trademarked terms (like droid, Force, lightsaber) and then write your own words (sentences, paragraphs, etc) to write a book called "War in the Stars" and be totally legal.

copyright violation covers use of the owning author's text (not ideas). Sentences, paragraphs, etc. What your English teacher would call plagiarism. The only practical way to use somebody else's text is to reference the heck out of it in a bibliography and to be discussing the quoted text in your own text.

trademark violation covers use of the owners terms, symbols, keywords (character names, tech names, etc)

patent violation covers use of the owner's ideas. And books/stories don't fall into patent domain. Processes and technologies do.

I don't know why, but it seems like you are fretting about the wrong things. There are plenty of examples of folks taking fan fiction and turning it into gold. The city of bones chick was originally writing very popular Harry Potter FanFic, got seriously warned, so she took the material and re-skinned it and now has her own books and movie.

If I was you, and your story hour was so awesomely valuable, but rife with text from other works, I would do the following:

Copy all the material into Word
Start scrubbing it for other people's direct IP (Vecna, D&D, etc).
Rename any characters/etc that are somebody else's IP).

Rewrite chunks of the text after this scrub job. Odds are good, your writing could use it (dang near every author writes his book a few times over). That ain't an insult. It's just the practical nature of writing that pretty much every paragraph could be written better than when it first sprung from a pen. i think people call that hindsight. Or polishing.


If you got something that's well written, entertaining, you should end up with a publishable product (as in something other people will want to read). That's how you transform your past work into something you can productize.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Yeah, but you can't write (fill in plot of Star Wars here, change the names and dialogue) and expect to skate. I'm no legal guy but I'll betcha that wouldn't work out too well.

It worked for the Eragon series, at least for the first two books. And Brooks ripped off Tolkien pretty blatantly.