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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5405007" data-attributes="member: 19675">Mere inaction or delayed action ≠ abandonment.  To prove abandonment, the lawyer would have to prove that WotC did NOTHING to protect its rights and/or that they have acted inconsistently and selectively in enforcement...both damn tough to do.I disagree.Disney went after an obscure animated porno producer who barely made a cent with his ripoffs of Disney characters in adult shorts and won.  The harm, if any, was to the brand and associations and goodwill, not the bottom line.Sometimes you don't want your product out in the stream of commerce at all.  Prince went after people who released unauthorized copies of songs he was working on.  Few of those songs were ever released commercially.  He sued, not because he lost money- he actually gained money when the profits were confiscated- but because he felt the songs stolen were of inferior quality.  The damage was not monetary, but to his public image.And then there's a dirty little secret of IP law: sometimes you sue in copyright to protect other, less strongly protected forms of intellectual property.  D&D isn't just a copyrighted game, its a set of trademarks, service marks and so forth...but defending all those other things can be tough, time consuming and expensive.  But waving the copyright bat around gets people's attention: the fines are bigger; there's the threat of jail time; there's the loooonng duration of protection.(BTW, its not just in the USA that corporations can go after infringers who haven't done financial harm.)You don't know that it wasn't about money or protecting their IP, etc.- nor do I- because 1) there are valid business reasons to do all of those things you dismiss and 2) we were not there in the boardrooms where these decisions were being made.  We're all just speculating.Only time will tell.</blockquote>

Verification