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I'd say when you're getting to the level of "government security clearance", you are talking about "surveillance states". Certainly none of what you mentioned predates written language. Nor do I see how "the essential options for reacting to such discoveries" is relevant to the discussion. What...

It is, in some ways. Being copyrighted or probably copyrighted for 95 years has kept many works hidden from view until after anyone who read them new has died. Is a work of art not nearly as effectively as destroyed if it is completely hidden from view, then if it is physically destroyed? I...

This is late, but I'd like to point out that HathiTrust and Google Books have well over a million publicly available works, virtually the complete pre-1925 contents of several major university libraries, including some notorious racist works. Much of the history of pulp literature, including...

You're arguing that plagiarism is a bad thing, we aren't doing bad things, therefore we aren't doing plagiarism. That's not a strong argument. When you copy worksheets without giving credit to the original author, you're engaging in plagiarism. In some fields, this copying would be a big deal...

You're moving the lines, then. When we talked about plagiarism, we were obviously talking about Farquhar's original statement.

You don't know that. Logic does not dictate goals; it can but offer routes to goals. Maybe he did not prioritize his future career; his actions would still be entirely logical, just with different goals then you would have.

Citation is always a waste of time. How does it serve the publisher to offer the name of the cover painter, or the interior writers? (Note that many ghost writers are happy to be anonymous.) Citation is a way to give fair credit to the producer of a work. It's demanded in some fields and it's...

I think that ignores the reality of the situation. Pre-Internet, a well-known figure in the RPG community looks for a job with GE. Do they look at the fanzine he edited and largely wrote? No. Do they look at his letters and writings in Dragon Magazine? No. Do they even look at the major...

Merriam-Webster offers a definition of "use (another's production) without crediting the source". Whether plagiarism is considered a big deal certainly varies from place to place, but the fact that elementary school teachers don't bother crediting who wrote their worksheets does communicate that...

A vast multiverse can have a problem where you wander into a pocket dimension, you do whatever there, and then leave, never to meet any of those people again or have it have any effect on the further game. That may be what you want, but many people don't want that. If you want to play Amber...

Besides possible non-obvious differences, game stores aren't just RPG stores; RPGs are just one product line. Also look at Full Line-Up of Free Comic Book Day 2020 Comics Announced! ; Archie, Power Rangers, My Little Ponies, Legend of Zelda, Stranger Things, Batman, Little Lulu, Mean Girls...

The Berne Convention has an option for the rule of the shorter term; the US does not implement it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term has a partial list of nations that don't. US Copyright Office: URAA Restoration says "A French short story that was first published without...

If you have the 20 races and 16 classes I'm offering my next campaign, and you find you can't be creative without the twelve excluded combinations of those 320 race-class combinations, I'm not sure you're very creative. You want your character to be connected to a hugely powerful figure in the...

Yes, because you don't write clearly. I was trying to ask politely what you mean. You don't need to answer the other questions at all; but if you wanted to have a discussion and actually figure out what I'm thinking, it might help. A DM doesn't usually want to let PCs have friends in high...

There are all sorts of fluff restrictions on paladins, they just don't have the mechanical connection. You're quite unlikely to have a high-level spell cast on you as a low-level smuck. And being reincarnated from an elf into a half-orc is likely to have huge effects on a character. You...

But they will. Anyone who plays a gnome barbarian will probably tell you at length why their character is a gnome barbarian. It's certainly not because they're trying to maximize their power. Barbarian is not characterized as something special to one race, whereas bladesinger is. If it's a...

The first post in this thread said "It does not matter whether or not you make a profit from it." If the question is simply "will they sue you?", it makes quite a difference.

If the rights fell into the hands of a copyright troll or a Satanic Panic group, I can see it. Even with an RPG company, if they take the line that their adventures are everything and that anyone making their own adventures are stealing from their pocket, or some author or estate is fine with...

WRT bladesingers, I don't think that it would automatically spread that quick. If there's a vast number of bladesingers and a very cosmopolitan society, then there would probably be non-elvish bladesingers. If there was a small society of bladesingers, magic itself being rare, some mutual...