seankreynolds
Adventurer
Henry said:Seriously, It's a major issue for freelancers who wanted to re-use those articles, but the way I see it, Dragon was an unusual case; the majority of freelancers who contributed to Dragon, also gamers themselves, got more from the CD-ROM archives than they lost, because the majority of work done was for outdated game systems, and no longer commercially viable.
But many of the most vocal freelance authors against the Dragon CD-ROM claim that those 5-year-old stories and articles are extremely valuable, and publishing the CD-ROM would be ruining their ability to make zillions of dollars from that gold mine of OOP material.
I happen to disagree with them. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy if the stuff I wrote for TSR/WotC 5 years ago was now publically available for free. I don't own it, though (work for hire contract says they own it outright) so I don't have any say in it. At least it's available as an inexpensive PDF in most cases.
Also, I believe in recent months a higher court has overturned the ruling in the National Geographic case (a similar case to the Dragon CD-ROM), ruling that it's not infringement for a publisher to release a compilation of magazines in CD form. So if that changes the possibility of future Dragon/Dungeon CD-ROMs ... who knows? Then again, the decision could be overturned by an even higher court (but I think that means it would have to go to the Supreme Court).
grodog said:David Kenzer has stated on the Kenzer message boards that there never was Kenzer lawsuit vs. WotC: that's apparently gamer urban legend.
Have you considered that Kenzer may not be telling the truth?
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