Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 9466130" data-attributes="member: 10531">So, a few things of note.1) National Geographic did its release of "our whole archive on CD-ROM" thing in 1997, so two years before Dragon, which probably made TSR/WotC feel rather confident in the legality of their project.2) New York Times Company, Inc. v. Tasini (2001) is not, in fact, directly on point, explicitly because of the "standing alone and not in context" thing people mentioned earlier in this thread. Yes, sure, there was a searchable database on the Dragon CD-ROM, but you didn't get the whole articles through that, you got directed to the digital facsimile of the original article in the original context -- matching, as it happens, what National Geographic did with their collection.3) National Geographic was, in fact sued over their collection, in the cases Greenberg v. National Geographic and Faulkner v. National Geographic. National Geographic initially lost in Greenberg before the Eleventh Circuit, in 2001, before the NYT v. Tasini ruling came out. National Geographic then won in Faulkner before the Second Circuit in 2005, with the Second Circuit saying that the Greenberg ruing was inconsistent with the Supreme Court ruling NYT v. Tasini. In 2008, the Eleventh Circuit agreed with the Second Circuit, and reversed itself, ruling in favor of National Geographic. There are accordingly two US Federal appellate courts (the level directly below the Supreme Court) that say what National Geographic did was perfectly legal after NYT v. Tasini.4) You'll notice that neither the SFWA* settlement nor the Kenzer settlement involved, at any point, any actual court judgment against WotC. And both the SFWA and Kenzer settlement agreements were, in fact, reached before the NYT v. Tasini ruling† anyway, so that ruling couldn't have had any effect on them.So, no, the ruling in NYT v. Tasini didn't mean that the Dragon Magazine Archive violated anybody's copyright, and in any case the ruling came along too late to have any effect on the settlements that were reached regarding that product.[HR][/HR]*While the full name is either the "Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America" or the "Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association", the correct abbreviation is, formally and officially, "SFWA", with only one "F". (Yes, there's a bit of history behind all that.)†The licensed-under-settlement-terms version of the Kingdoms of Kalamar had already been released and was subsequently reviewed on RPG.net <a href="https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_4204.phtml" target="_blank">by April 29, 2001</a>; the ruling in NYT v. Tasini came down on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Tasini" target="_blank">June 25, 2001</a>.</blockquote>

Verification