D&D 5E D&D Beyond Cancels Competition

I'm Irish and also did work experience as a 16 year old for two weeks as part of a voluntary subject for the Leaving Certificate examination. I believe those who do Transition Year (an optional year (in some schools - other schools make you do it) that I did not do had to do longer work experience or shadowing.

Mine was an actual job in that while I believe I only worked half hours (I don't remember working up to 6 - it was more like 3), I did do some basic website programming, problem solving and some minor design work. I was also working in the company my dad worked for, which was part of the reason why I was there (as my work place was 30 to 40 minutes away from my school).

My feelings now on whether it was exploitation, or perhaps more accurately, whether it could be exploitation are complicated. At the time I would not have thought of it that way at all - but I was a teenager just happy to get out of school and to do some interesting work, and the program and my school is designed to protect students. I am also lucky that I was interested in dad's work and could get in there - I know people who were not as fortunate as I, and were forced to do naughty word work (i.e. getting coffee etc.) without allowing work shadowing, which I think is pretty borderline.

To me in these cases it really depends on the protections in place, how possible it would be for a teenager to do the job, and whether the workplace is properly teaching students, and how long the period lasts. My experience is probably fairly unique since I didn't have to interact with strangers to do it.

(FWIW Ireland is not as bad as some countries when it comes to reductions on minimum pay for those under 24 or 25 - at 20 you're paid the full minimum wage, whereas I believe countries like the UK make you wait until you're 25!)

ReshiIRE said:

I'm Irish and also did work experience as a 16 year old for two weeks as part of a voluntary subject for the Leaving Certificate examination. I believe those who do Transition Year (an optional year (in some schools - other schools make you do it) that I did not do had to do longer work experience or shadowing.

Mine was an actual job in that while I believe I only worked half hours (I don't remember working up to 6 - it was more like 3), I did do some basic website programming, problem solving and some minor design work. I was also working in the company my dad worked for, which was part of the reason why I was there (as my work place was 30 to 40 minutes away from my school).

My feelings now on whether it was exploitation, or perhaps more accurately, whether it could be exploitation are complicated. At the time I would not have thought of it that way at all - but I was a teenager just happy to get out of school and to do some interesting work, and the program and my school is designed to protect students. I am also lucky that I was interested in dad's work and could get in there - I know people who were not as fortunate as I, and were forced to do naughty word work (i.e. getting coffee etc.) without allowing work shadowing, which I think is pretty borderline.

To me in these cases it really depends on the protections in place, how possible it would be for a teenager to do the job, and whether the workplace is properly teaching students, and how long the period lasts. My experience is probably fairly unique since I didn't have to interact with strangers to do it.

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I can agree there. The problem with most unpaid work is that it can easily and quickly trend toward exploitation even if it doesn't always necessarily yield that result.

ReshiIRE said:

(FWIW Ireland is not as bad as some countries when it comes to reductions on minimum pay for those under 24 or 25 - at 20 you're paid the full minimum wage, whereas I believe countries like the UK make you wait until you're 25!)

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I wasn't aware anything like this existed. I would consider this kind of system to be more exploitative than anything we have been discussing.

FrogReaver said:

Would you willingly participate in activities that exploit you? Of course not. The only people that would are the coerced or mentally ill.

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Umm, I would point to the multi-billion dollar industry of college football in the United States where players are essentially unpaid.

TheSword said:

Every secondary student in the UK does unpaid work experience in their mid teens. It’s unpaid. They work. Is it exploitative? I sincerely hope not as it’s a pain in the arse to oversee and schedule.

We also take older work experience candidates who want experience for applications for medical school or further education courses. Even just because they want to work in the field. Again exploitative or not?

This is ubiquitous in the UK. I always got the impression internships in US were more elite, but maybe I’m just going by the TV.

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In the US unpaid internships are absolutely and often exploitation. Kids who can be funded by their parents can maybe gain some connections through them, but it's often not about learning anything. During the Obama years there was a regulation that such internships had to meet certain criteria, one of which was that "that the employer providing the training derived no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern, and on occasion its operations were actually impeded." This was of course rescinded by his successor.

I don't know about dndbeyond specifically, but I think a lot of people are so desperate to break into a creative field like ttrpgs that they will undervalue their skill in order to hopefully break through. WOTC's seeming policy of having a barebones design/creative staff supplemented by freelancers takes advantage of this fact (while producing arguably worse products).

People who buy lottery tickets or video game loot boxes do so willingly. Are those things exploitative? (yes)

We have similar work/study programs here in Canada in high school. When I did it, back in the stone ages, I was given credit for the time towards my high school diploma. A single semester of working mornings at a local newspaper got me the equivalent credit of 2 full classes.

So, no, job training is not exploitative. It's training you for a job. You are gaining a skill through this training that you can then potentially get a full time job with. And, note, at the university level, these programs are full time paid positions. The University of Waterloo work/study program placed you at a company for about 4 months where you were paid a heck of a lot more than minimum wage. While I didn't do the program, friends paid their way through school with theirs.

But, I'd like to come back to this point about the boilerplate being "protection". See, AFAIK, it is only protecting you from those who entered the contest. Only thing is, there are already hundreds, if not thousands, of these frames out in the wild, many of them in for sale collections. Which means that D&DB would have to do an image search before they put it on their website. They wouldn't really have a choice since it's entirely possible that a great, wonderful, winning idea, is really, really close to some other person's great, wonderful idea that they've had up for sale on Roll 20 for the past two years.

Not because of any deliberate fraud, but, because there are only so many great, wonderful, winning ideas and a lot of them start looking really the same when you start dealing with large numbers.

So, the boilerplate doesn't actually protect DDB at all. Well, it protects them from the contest entrants, I suppose, but, since there are many other artists out in the wild and a pretty large library of images that have been around for about 20 years (the first time I used a VTT was 2002 and they had frames back then) then they're going to have to do these image searches anyway.

People are just assuming that the boilerplate is doing the job. I really don't think it's doing anything at all.

Hussar said:

People are just assuming that the boilerplate is doing the job. I really don't think it's doing anything at all.

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I disagree that it’s not doing anything. The boilerplate* prevents the possibility of a lawsuit, because there has been an assignment of rights (a license) in the creative work.

Here's the basic problem, and why creative contests should be disfavored (and continue to be by mainstream creative companies- it's not like you'll see Disney run an open, "Send us ur awesome MCU movie ideas and we will make them" contest, and when there is a contest, it is usually a tightly-controlled one with a limited number of pre-approved entrants- usually in a reality show)-

Imagine 99.9% of all people are good, amazing, and would never bring a lawsuit. Period. Maybe you think that number is a little too generous to human nature, maybe you think I'm being overly cynical. But it's good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and internet spitballin'.

Now, if a given contest has 10,000 entries, then ... you have ten crazies in the pool. Ten people that might bring some type of lawsuit, maybe.

Okay! But what if the lawsuit has absolutely no merit? Well, remember the dialogue with Debbie Downer I wrote earlier- that does not matter. If you get into facts, if you have to spend money to get past a procedural dismissal... You have already lost.

And that's why the language is used. A lot of these standard provisions in many contracts are to dissuade lawsuits from being filed.

*One more time- boilerplate is often misunderstood. Most of the super-duper important provisions of the contract are boilerplate; boilerplate just means language that is re-used from contract to contract. The reason the language is always used, whether it's a merger clause, or an arbitration clause, or a licensing clause, or an attorney's fees clause. is because they've been shown to be effective as worded (usually) and so they keep getting recycled until ... they aren't.

FrogReaver said:

Would you willingly participate in activities that exploit you? Of course not. The only people that would are the coerced or mentally ill.

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Seems a little naive to think that people can't be naive.

TheSword said:

I’m not in the US. However I understand that even in the US independently arriving at a work is a defense.

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So, that can hold if you had no reasonable way to have prior knowledge of the work.

If, however, D&D Beyond has been given a copy of your work as a contest submission, and a year or two or seven, or twenty years later (copyright lasts a long time) they use art that is "substantially similar", then they don't get to use that as a defense.

Which is really why they reserve right to the work - it isn't that they actually plan to use your work for free. It is so you cannot, later on, say they didn't have right to make something similar to it.

Snarf Zagyg said:

I disagree that it’s not doing anything. The boilerplate* prevents the possibility of a lawsuit, because there has been an assignment of rights (a license) in the creative work.

Here's the basic problem, and why creative contests should be disfavored (and continue to be by mainstream creative companies- it's not like you'll see Disney run an open, "Send us ur awesome MCU movie ideas and we will make them" contest, and when there is a contest, it is usually a tightly-controlled one with a limited number of pre-approved entrants- usually in a reality show)-

Imagine 99.9% of all people are good, amazing, and would never bring a lawsuit. Period. Maybe you think that number is a little too generous to human nature, maybe you think I'm being overly cynical. But it's good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and internet spitballin'.

Now, if a given contest has 10,000 entries, then ... you have ten crazies in the pool. Ten people that might bring some type of lawsuit, maybe.

Okay! But what if the lawsuit has absolutely no merit? Well, remember the dialogue with Debbie Downer I wrote earlier- that does not matter. If you get into facts, if you have to spend money to get past a procedural dismissal... You have already lost.

And that's why the language is used. A lot of these standard provisions in many contracts are to dissuade lawsuits from being filed.

*One more time- boilerplate is often misunderstood. Most of the super-duper important provisions of the contract are boilerplate; boilerplate just means language that is re-used from contract to contract. The reason the language is always used, whether it's a merger clause, or an arbitration clause, or a licensing clause, or an attorney's fees clause. is because they've been shown to be effective as worded (usually) and so they keep getting recycled until ... they aren't.

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But, this doesn't stop the ten people. All it does is reduce the chances, true, by removing contestants from the pool of "people who could sue me" but, that pool still exists. And it's a pretty large pool. There are many, many artists out there who have created thousands of these style of images. And every single one of them could potentially sue you.

So, how has the company been protected?