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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2391232" data-attributes="member: 14159">Exactly, if copyright lapsed because it was unenforced, abandonware wouldn't be much of an issue, for example.  Copyright and Patents last one way or the other.  (Obligatory IANAL, but it's hard to be a geek today without learning some basic IP law, if only to be careful with).As for a trademark falling into common language, I think the courts have ruled that White Wolf does NOT own the worlds "Vampire" and "Werewolf", something about a movie last year that featured them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Also, having looked through the discussion on White Wolf's forums, I notice a distinct difference in the way many of us are looking at this and the way some White Wolf fans are looking at it.  I've noticed some fans there actually agreeing with this, on the grounds that if you have a public performance of a play or a piece of music you have to give royalties to the author, and they say that larps are just a different kind of performance art, so you have to give royalties to the author, which they consider to be White Wolf.  White Wolf has always encouraged their games to be seen as something more than games, as an artform, as an interactive story.  Thus paying White Wolf to use their book is no different than a theater company paying a playwright to use his newest play.  White Wolf even encourages this line of thought by calling gaming groups "troupes" like a group of actors (I never hear that term outside WW fandom to refer to gamers, ever).This is pretty much unenforceable, and it sounds like maybe they have little intent on enforcing it at all and just using it as a token legal shield of deniability whenever something goes wrong ("that game was unsanctioned!"), but it could be a big blowback in the faces of their fans.</blockquote>

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