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Story hour publishing and copyright issues
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<blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6202421" data-attributes="member: 8835"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>Totally legal.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>trademark violation covers use of the owners terms, symbols, keywords (character names, tech names, etc)</p><p></p><p>patent violation covers use of the owner's ideas. And books/stories don't fall into patent domain. Processes and technologies do.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>If I was you, and your story hour was so awesomely valuable, but rife with text from other works, I would do the following:</p><p></p><p>Copy all the material into Word</p><p>Start scrubbing it for other people's direct IP (Vecna, D&D, etc).</p><p>Rename any characters/etc that are somebody else's IP).</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Janx, post: 6202421, member: 8835"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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