AI/LLMs SWURPG — A new and free Star Wars tabletop RPG (passion project)

[Dire Bare]

That's not how copyright works. It isn't price-dependent.

Not a lawyer . . . creating fan content is protected by fair use, at least to my understanding.

I can write a Superman novel and share it with the world . . . but without a license from DC Comics, I can't charge for it, I have to release it for free as fan fiction.

Of course, various IP holders have gone after fan fiction at various times. Or fan game design. TSR earned the moniker "They Sue Regularly" for that behavior. And because corporations that control our favorite IPs have big legal teams, it's usually better to pull your fan-fiction Superman novel down rather than fight it in court.

Every company is different, but it feels like these days most IP holders have realized that trying to squash fan fiction / game design is not a good look and not worth their time. Trying to shut down fan fiction is like playing whack-a-mole, and the company looks like a bully picking on fans, and fan fiction is fans engaging with the property and can actually lead to the property having higher visibility, higher engagement, and ultimately more folks purchasing the "official" stuff.

I don't think I'm wrong here on fan fiction being illegal . . . but even if I am, I don't think the OP has much to worry about.

On the other hand, the use of AI, even in a fan project, turns me cold, so I won't be engaging with this particular project.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Not a lawyer . . . creating fan content is protected by fair use, at least to my understanding.

I think it's more that making it commercial is a very clear legal line for copyright infringement. Non-commercial can be tolerated and it depends on how transformative it is.

 

[Morrus]

Not a lawyer . . . creating fan content is protected by fair use, at least to my understanding.

I can write a Superman novel and share it with the world . . . but without a license from DC Comics, I can't charge for it, I have to release it for free as fan fiction.

This is not correct.

If you don't charge for it, the IP holder probably won't bother to pursue you. It's likely not worth their effort, and it's a bad look. But they can, because it is an IP violation, and the more blatant it is the more likely they will do so. Copyright laws aren't dependent on the price you charge (whether that be $1M or $0),

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The legal status here is entirely up to the IP holder. Fair use is a weak defense. It shouldn't be; robust Fair Use would make the American copyright system more aligned with the public good and the Constitution, but courts have whittled Fair Use down to virtually a dead letter for any activity which isn't a common and accepted practice (and really any one that's not a common accepted practice by media entities owned by large corporations). Really the only defenses for most obviously IP using activities are it being uncatchable (educational fair use protections have been winnowed down to nothing, but there is generally no monitor on a school staff room's photocopier... yet), or being small enough or well-liked enough that the rightsholder chooses to forebear the reputational damage they get from shutting down the little guy.

George Lucas took a mostly encouraging stance towards not-for-profit fan works, and though I worried the takeover of Lucasfilm by the infamously litigious Walt Disney Company would lead to a sharp turn on this front by Lucasfilm, I have yet to hear of that sharp turn happening per se. I do think Disney realized to some degree that their infamously zealous litigiousness back in the 90s was doing more harm than good.

That said this product would function as a direct competitor to the official Star Wars TTRPG, a licensed product still in print (now printed by Edge). While the official product is in a bit of a limbo (no new books are being made, and licensing issues keep digital versions from being available as the hobby increasingly goes digital), it is still an officially licensed product. And the fact that it is on life support is all the more reason Disney will probably turn around at some point soon and license the IP to some other TTRPG company (for them then to yank the rights from and screw a few years later, because this is the cycle of licensed products). And at the point where they are negotiating a new license they will not want fan competitors.

Now while I personally am supportive of a solo creator leveraging AI to, say, build a website for and slap some cover art on their passion project, large swaths of people clearly not only foam at the mouth at such affronts, but immediately get on soap boxes to denounce them, before even giving more than a cursory glance at the underlying material which is presumably the actual passion project actual human work went into (hopefully!). And so given that OP is wholly dependent on Disney fearing a fan backlash, it seems like it would be best to curry favor with the anti-AI public and strip the project of it's AI gloss and polish. You don't want to be a little guy that the public wants to see shut down, because Disney will happily oblige.

If this was just shared as the 74 pages of text in the PDF after the cover image posted to some forums or whatever it would be recieving an entirely different response right now.

 

[Morrus]

That said this product would function as a direct competitor to the official Star Wars TTRPG, a licensed product still in print (now printed by Edge). While the official product is in a bit of a limbo (no new books are being made, and licensing issues keep digital versions from being available as the hobby increasingly goes digital), it is still an officially licensed product. And the fact that it is on life support is all the more reason Disney will probably turn around at some point soon and license the IP to some other TTRPG company (for them then to yank the rights from and screw a few years later, because this is the cycle of licensed products). And at the point where they are negotiating a new license they will not want fan competitors.

Then again there has been a fancy looking 5E Star Wars out there for years, and nobody at FFG/Edge or Disney seems to care.

If I was paying through the nose for the expensive Star Wars license I’d probably care very much about the Star Wars 5E project. But I’m not.

(And that maybe speaks more to how much they aren’t that bothered about the license themselves—I’ve not followed it but have they released anything new for it recently?)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Is it out of print? I still see the Edge/FFG books coming in and out of my FLGS.

No, but they are not releasing new content, and haven't since before Edge acquired the license. Just reprints. No plans to do anything with the game beyond that as far as I know.