Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 4396211" data-attributes="member: 3448">As I tried to make clear, I am not an expert in IP law.  And there are issues that I didn't cover or simplified, partly due to my lack of expertise.  Anyone relying on my post as their whole analysis is being foolish and acting at their own peril.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I don't know the full scope of what constitutes infringement if you make an obviously imitative work--I think you may be right that that can lead to infringement, although dozens of Lord of the Rings knock-offs demonstrate that it doesn't necessarily.  However, I do know that it is standard black-letter law that copyright protects specific representations of ideas, not the ideas themselves and that names cannot be copyrighted (although they can be trademarked).  What I viewed as misinformation was specifically the notion that the names of classes could be copyrighted in and of themselves.  (They could of course be trademarked, but that's different, and requires an affirmative act by the party trademarking the term to indicate that status.  Also, most of the names of the current classes probably couldn't be trademarked anyway, because most of the classes have names that are widely used in other games, anyway.)The area is hazy.  If I made it sound otherwise, I'm sorry.  My understanding is that the general consensus is that gaming products designed to piggyback on pre-existing games do not infringe copyright, assuming they don't violate trademarks, copy text, or the like, but there are relatively few cases addressing the issue squarely.  There is probably nothing that anyone can publish that is explicitly designed to use the 4E rules and is unlicensed that would be completely clear of any risk of at least getting sued, even if WotC would not prevail.  But there are things that can be done that would reduce the risk, and that would in particular reduce the risk of being sued successfully.</blockquote>

Verification