Fan Site Legalities

[Lizard]

Well, being a fan site, and being a publisher are two *very* different things in my book.

But not in the eyes of the law. There's no legal concept of "fan site". If you make material available to the public, you're publishing. Period. Full stop.

This is good, in that you get the same First Amendment protection that the New York Times gets. This is bad, in that you are exposed to same copyright, libel, and slander laws that the New York Times is, and most 'fan' publishers are utterly clueless about what those are.

 

[Lady Danyon]

But not in the eyes of the law.

As it stands, yes. But to *me* personally, being a publisher and a fan site are two different things, and there should be different standards IMO.

What is, should be, and could be, are endless. Irregardless, the information provided is something to "watch" IMHO.

Good Gaming!

-Danyon

 

[Don]

Umbran:

Did you know that people thought it was ludicrous to be able to copyright musical performances and vinyl records up until sometime in the 1960s?

As for your comment on modern ability to mass reproduce music, you've made a fatal logical flaw: technology today has allowed the average person to make any kind of music (even something comparable to the orchestral classics). Getting rid of IP would absolutely NOT reduce the amount of music and books being created. Not by a long shot. There are thousands of people all over the world writing books and making fantastic music for the love of it. Thanks to the mindset of many people in our culture - and the fact that IP cartels (like the RIAA and MPAA) have situated themselves in the position of regulating and selling parts of our culture - these wonderful works wallow in obscurity because "it can't be any good if it's free".

Yes, let us consider the modern novel. It takes a long time and effort to write one. Thousands of people write short and long stories for free. For the love of it. A work of art generated for the love of it will be better than one generated for the love of money 9 times out of 10.

IP creates artificial restrictions on infinite resources. No where is it guaranteed that a person should make money for doing something (which is a belief that corporations have successfully instilled on a surprising number of people). Culture, especially, should be free of the polluting effects of money.

If we had popular distribution outlets for freely created electronic art (music, books, etc.) and a method for donating money to the creators we'd have much higher quality art and people could still make a buck.

It's just like when VCRs came out and the movie industry cried about the impending doom, and yet the opposite happened. Or when Napster first got popular and the music industry said the sky was falling, and yet sales rose (in fact, sales started to fall after Napster was shut down!). Photocopiers didn't kill books. Rewriteable CDs and high speed internet didn't kill the video game industry (which continues to make insane profits).

Society will not collapse if IP laws were scaled back to reasonable amounts of time (for example, 2 years for computer programs, 5 years for books, or something like that, instead of lifetime+125-or-whatever-insane-amount of time that corporations have bribed the government into writing into law).

Your mentioning the ability to mass produce things brings up this point: if we can create something faster, then it stands to reason that the majority of sales should occur during a shorter time period. Why, then, have copyright laws been increase by an order of magnitude since their inception?

One answer: Greed. Pure and simple. That's the only reason why Disney has stolen Mickey Mouse from the people (yes, Mickey Mouse would have belonged to the public by now if it weren't for corporations buying laws).

Alright, everyone's sick of me talking about this so I'll shut up. No more posts to this thread from me.

 

[Oni]

I just wanted to say as someone that aspires to one day be an illustrator, and as someone that prefers to work in a digital format I want laws to that protect me and keep people from using my hard work for gain without my permission. Its not that I'm greedy, but I want to be able make enough money at doing what I love to be able to devote my time to it, rather than just trying to squeeze it around time spent trying to support myself. I feel that protection should extend thoughout my lifetime.

 

[jasper]

mickey mouse is not in the public domain.
A guy name Walt created a company called Disney.
Walt and his workers created a character named Mickey.
Copyright laws apply to the life of the creator aka the corporation plus either 20 years or 17 years.
I have not heard that Disney corp had died.
I create my super squire stories for the love of creating and sharing them friends.
I would be angry if someone would start printing them for a profit.

lets take the Dark Dungeons parody which floats around. I think the creator is on thin ice. Grant he can use some parts for parody and far use. The parody uses all the publication. Of course a smart lawyer would say drop 2 or more frames.

An actor/celebrity has a right to how his image is use. Can you see the EGG getting bad if someone post his face to nude model.

Napster was stealing property. It was outside the fair use laws.

Don do you think it will be okay if I scanned all the core books in to a web page and charged for access?

Does the average person make music which is good enough to keep? Or do you forget because it is just average.

Record companies pay for advertising,recording studio, the performers, etc, so everyone knows who Weird Al is.
Today Weirld Al is able to cut his own songs and place on MP3 etc but would we care if we never heard of Weird Al before hand. Or would we have to go thru 1000 sites to find that one musicain who we enjoy.

... A work of art generated for the love of it will be better than one generated for the love of money 9 times out of 10...

Okay send me some of your art work for free.
9 out 10 things created are not saleable. I would not pay and don't pay for the art I see done by anybody. If I going to buy artwork I want to be good because I say it is not because Mr. Artist thinks it a thing of love and beauty.

...infinite resources... gee not everyone has access to a computer.

gee mass production means more sells in shorter time. Is this why my local car dealers try to dump their stock before the new car year?

Some of those corporations were put together by the creators to protect their works.

Oh Shakespeare and other pre copyright laws are not totally free from copyright. Which means I do shakespeare but unless I translate my self I have to pay the publishing company for the play. Since their version of the play.
My wife is trying to find different versions Hamlet to see what was cut and drop through the ages. Anyone know where I can get a copy of the Folios?

fan sites are pass over at whim of the creator of copyright material.

 

[Don]

Last Post, I promise

mickey mouse is not in the public domain.
A guy name Walt created a company called Disney.
Walt and his workers created a character named Mickey.
Copyright laws apply to the life of the creator aka the corporation plus either 20 years or 17 years.
I have not heard that Disney corp had died.

My bad for not remembering the numbers clearly.

Only people can claim copyrights 70 years after they die. Corporations get it for 95 years, period (i.e. not 95 years after they cease to exist). This was recently upped from 50/75 years respectively thanks to well documented lobbying by Disney.

How would you feel if you had an agreement with someone, but when the time for you to get your end of the bargain, the person with whom you entered the agreement went behind your back and changed the agreement? That's what happens everytime copyrights get extended by 20 years.

 

[jasper]

contract??

disney did not have a contract with me or you about mickey mouse.
The use the law process to get the law change to protect their product/idea.
Have you use the law process to try to get changed back?

Now if you try to change the law to cause the contract between and you, the bad faith and other laws could come into affect. However since in the 1980's some retirees got hurt by corporations changing their retirements funds, you may still be able to change the law to get our contract null and void.

 

[maddman75]

Never get into an IP discussion where Open Source fans can be found >

First of all there is NO SUCH THING as intellectual proerty. That is a fantasy of the media conglomerates that thier copyrights will last forever. No IP, never was, never will be.

There is no right to control of your creations.

What there is is a special exception to my rights to free speech and free press, in order to encourage creativity. That is fine - but lets not pretend that copyright is inalienable or anything. It prevents me from publishing the works of others.

Within this we have the idea of fair use, which is to say that as long as I'm not publishing, I can do whatever I want with it. This has been trampled by DVD encrypting (which is simple to crack, its only protected by keeping programmers from even discussing it - in clear violation of the 1st amendment) and DVD region encoding. Not to mention the new Universal crippled CDs that might or might not work in your stereo and computer - and definetely will not work if you don't use windows)

If you are interested in this, go to http://www.gnu.org and read some of Richard Stallman's speeches. They explain the position better than I can .

The basic open source position is this: A person should be paid for thier labor, not some fictional 'IP', which is governmental control of the people. For instance, a programmer would work for X company to solve Y problem. His resulting work is released to the public for others to use and learn from. The company hasn't lost anything, their problem is solved. The programmer still gets paid, and when the company needs to add such and such feature to the program, odds are likely someone else has done a similar thing. Another example is Larry Wall. He invented a programming language called Perl. It is used to power most of the interactive sites on the web (including this forum IIRC). He gave it away - it is free and open. He makes quite a good living writing books on how to program in perl. He wins, society wins.

Granted, this doesn't work as well for all media - but some openness can be energize an industry. Do you think 3e would be as big if the copyright police were as adamant as they used to be in the bad old days? If there were no Hackmaster, no Sword and Sorcery, No AEG or Mongoose - would 3e be as big? No. With the OGL wizards allows others to use their "ip" and they benefit from this.

Some form of copyrights are needed for some works, but not all of them. The entire system is broken and falling apart in the face of new technology. ANyway, I'll stop now before this thread becomes hopelessly political.

Now make sure no one mentions patent laws - or we'll have to take this to a forum where I can cuss

 

[drothgery]

Society will not collapse if IP laws were scaled back to reasonable amounts of time (for example, 2 years for computer programs, 5 years for books, or something like that, instead of lifetime+125-or-whatever-insane-amount of time that corporations have bribed the government into writing into law).

While I think the length of modern copyright protection is insanely long, your proposed scalebacks are insanely short. Large commercial applications, and even more complex games, can take two years or more to write, and can often be sold profitably for five years or more; there are certainly 5-year-old PlayStation RPGs that I plan on purchasing as soon as I finish what I've got right now. And books can often take a decade. So I'd figure something like 10 years for software, and 30 years for written works is more reasonable.

 

[jasper]

The difference mad man is the author CHOSE to give away in part or all his rights.
Now there once a computer geek name billy who....
Was ask by a EVIL computer company name IBM (Its Big Monster) to do some code named DOS.
IBM didnot know the law or did not care.
So Billy got the floss on dos
which became windows
which now runs the world so you don't have too.

It appears what DON is saying is Billy would only get paid once by IBM and the rest would be up to us to code like Perl. Or I pay billy once for Window 1911 and I am allowed to share with everyone.

Also it appears that DON is saying the new technology allows us to make copies so easily that Bridney Spears should be happy to pay $10 K to sing her new song once but we get to make a 1000 copies for free and owe her nothing.