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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snoweel" data-source="post: 1422276" data-attributes="member: 4453">I think there are dodgy moral issues related to the deification of intellectual property.I mean, just because somebody is the first to patent an idea, everybody else who ever comes up with said idea independently, owes fealty (for want of a better term) to the patent-holder.And anyway, since Tolkien's world-building imitators (namely Greenwood, Gygax and the rest of us) are free to use elves, dwarves, halflings and orcs (and I'm aware that JRRT himself 'borrowed' these races from mythology, but he did codify them as the fantasy-geek-community knows them), I can't imagine a law in any land that would allow somebody to monopolise an intellectual mish-mash of pirates, robots, dinosaurs and ninja.Proper nouns, sure, but at the end of the day, people pay for products, not ideas and therefore the founder of the 'genre' has no right to prosper over the more creative and hard-working guy who puts out more attractive and useful accessories/modules supporting the 'generic' ninjapunk/dinoriding pirate-noir setting.</blockquote>