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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 4641286" data-attributes="member: 463">I remember corresponding with a TSR lawyer in the mid-90s.  At the time I was writing my PhD on copyright, these days I'm a UK senior lecturer (US - Professor) teaching IP law, including copyright.  I remember being struck by how this TSR lawyer had only the vaguest idea about what US copyright law actually said.  They barely seemed to know the difference between copyright and trademarks.  One reason for the 'sue the fans' policy was that they apparently thought that copyrights became unenforceable if not aggressively enforced.  Which is potentially true for trademarks under US law, but bears no relation to copyright law.Edit:  As that article indicates, they also did not seem to know what a 'derivative work' was.  There was never any basis for their claims that a D&D-compatible adventure was inherently a derivative work of D&D.  They also didn't seem to understand that a phrase like "Armor Class" is not copyright protected.  Nor did they understand that trade mark infringement requires a commercial use of the mark - a use indicating the origin of goods.Edit 2:  Setting an adventure set arbitrarily in the Forgotten Realms setting does not create a derivative work of (eg) the FR 1e grey box contents.  Writing a story where the protagonist is Elminster might conceivably create a derivative work in US law, but still you have to go back to the original works and show where the non-literal copying occurred.  And there must be substantial copying of the original literary works.</blockquote>

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