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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 5963871" data-attributes="member: 18182">Not a lawyer, but your understanding does not apply to the situation.  It's not like Baur or any other D&D author in recent decades has lost rights to completely original work . . . they were playing with the D&D property and their work, while perhaps having a lot of originality, is both derivative and collaborative . . . and COMPLETELY owned by WotC.  And this is mostly due, not to any larger legal principle, but to the specific type of contracts WotC requires, called work-for-hire contracts.  WotC pays an author to write a D&D adventure, gamebook, novel, or whatever, and WotC keeps all the rights.  It's only works that TSR published before they started using work-for-hire contracts that WotC does not have complete rights too, and it's my understanding that it only includes certain articles in Dragon Mag during the early days of the magazine.If Salvatore decided to no longer write Drizzt novels for WotC, they would be perfectly within their rights, legally and morally, to have someone else do it.  In fact, this actually happened a number of years ago.  I don't remember why, but Salvatore was "done" with WotC, and they hired a completely different guy to write the next Drizzt novel.  The guy finished the novel, WotC started marketing it . . . but before they could publish it, they repaired their relationship with Salvatore, mothballed the now "lost" Drizzt novel (they didn't have to), and Salvatore went on to write a pile of new Drizzt books over the years.I love Salvatore's work, but I want to read that "lost" Drizzt novel.  It will probably never happen though . . .</blockquote>

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