Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 6254746" data-attributes="member: 2525">I am a lawyer, and yes much of it is copyright violations, and breach of the electronic license.The OGL specifically excludes electronic tools and games.  Nobody can use any WOTC copyrighted materials with those things, without their permission.You can likely use your old character builder with the old set of data that doesn't include most of the books and any of the errata.  But that's not what people were suggesting.   They were suggesting using it with new sets of data - which is copyright violation.  Nobody is allowed to distribute that data or receive a distribution of that data other than through WOTC, and only as a subscriber, and only under the terms and use they permit (which is currently with their current online method of accessing it).All of this was in the license agreement you had to agree to, in order to subscribe in the first place.I don't think there is anything "deeply controversial" about any of this.  It's all pretty cut and dried copyright and license stuff.  Legally, you can't do it without breaching copyright and/or the license itself.  There's no gray area to it.  You're either breaching a license you agreed to, or you're using copyrighted material without a license to do so.  None of it is in the public domain, none of it is OK under a prior OGL, none of it is OK "because you paid for access at one time".Now...will WOTC come after you? I personally doubt it.  But, that opinion is given freely, and you get what you pay for.</blockquote>

Verification