FantasyGrounds Takes Legal Action Against WotC

[jgerman]

As long as it's just blank fields with labels, you can do math with the numbers in those fields all you like.

That's from my first post, I think you missed that. I can make a character sheet for FG2 that has:

Weapon | Stat | vs Defense | +Prof | Total Bonus | Damage

Then put blanks below those. As long as the user has to type the weapon name, the stat to use (though it will reference a bonus entered elsewhere by the user), the defense it's aimed at, the proficiency bonus (again the user must type this, I can't have a lookup table), a calculated total attack bonus (adding up numbers entered by the user) and the damage dice are put in by the player--

I've broken no copyrights.

This is not legal advice:

You can do a lot more than that legally actually.


Of course there's nothing stopping from WotC from suing you even if you're in the right, which can be extremely costly.

 

[Fifth Element]

Yeah it will be changed and then both companies will move on.
However what this does do is show what wotc does and if i was a 3rd party publisher about to agree to a license that gave wotc permission to take my work and make it their own i would be rethinking my products.

This is quite a spectacular overreaction to something that was obviously a simple mistake, and that was quickly corrected.

Oh, and what Orcus said.

 

[Christian]

No, it's not that. You need to look at their "evidence."

http://www.fantasygrounds.com/misc/infringement.html

The top screen is what FGII looks like when you start it up. Note the position of the dice. Note the dice that are facing up. Note the alignment of the polygons, where the corners point. Note the numbers along the sides.

It's the exact same set of dice.

You all need to take a closer look at the 'south' face of the d8.

This is not theft, just coincidence. Quite a bizarre coincidence (the matching top number especially), but they did not use the exact images from the FG screencap ...

 

[RSKennan]

Yeah, it's pretty obvious what happened- as people have mentioned, it was probably an internal document that got made public accidentally.

In related news, I just bought FG 2 the day before the GSL hit, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens character sheet-wise (there's a functional one available on a fan site, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles yet). That's all I need, really. It really is a great piece of software.

Also, see my sig

 

[RSKennan]

You all need to take a closer look at the 'south' face of the d8.

This is not theft, just coincidence. Quite a bizarre coincidence (the matching top number especially), but they did not use the exact images from the FG screencap ...

All that proves is that they changed the illegible number to a 4, which says they knew what they were doing.

 

[rvalle]

You all need to take a closer look at the 'south' face of the d8.

This is not theft, just coincidence. Quite a bizarre coincidence (the matching top number especially), but they did not use the exact images from the FG screencap ...

From a post I made on the FG boards:

I showed this to a friend and he had to go and figure out the odds.

Not taking color into effect the chances of all WoTC's dice being on the same numbers as FG's dice is about 1 in 500,000.

If you take color into account assuming 64 colors its 1 in 33 Billion.

I pointed out this doesn't take into account the die orientation (all the die are sitting/pointing the same way)... if you say there are 8 directions its in about 1 a 'quadrillion'.



rv
________________________

Thats one heck of a coincidink.

rv

 

[webrunner]

Yeah, it's pretty obvious what happened- as people have mentioned, it was probably an internal document that got made public accidentally.

In related news, I just bought FG 2 the day before the GSL hit, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens character sheet-wise (there's a functional one available on a fan site, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles yet). That's all I need, really. It really is a great piece of software.

Also, see my sig

it isn't 'probably' at all - unless WOTC was lying, it's what they said happened.

 

[JDJblatherings]

All that proves is that they changed the illegible number to a 4, which says they knew what they were doing.

The WOTC copy is the FG version blurred. I just used "blur more" in photoshop on the FG image and sure enough they end up looking just like the WOTC image.

I honestly think it was simply a mistake. The image was never supposed to go public. No need to make excuses or assume WOTC were acting in a nefarious manner.

 

[RSKennan]

it isn't 'probably' at all - unless WOTC was lying, it's what they said happened.

It is probably, because they could be lying. Anyone can lie, especially when the stakes matter (not that they really do here).

That said, and despite my last post, I don't think it's nefarious at all, but I think that the person who edited the photo and took enough time to edit in a "4", and could have taken a bit more time and photographed some real dice with a camera phone or something.

At any rate, it's a dead issue, it's been handled by the two companies.

 

[Darrin Drader]

That said, and despite my last post, I don't think it's nefarious at all, but I think that the person who edited the photo and took enough time to edit in a "4", and could have taken a bit more time and photographed some real dice with a camera phone or something.

Yeah, or they could have used a screen shot from their own die roller.