Fan Content Guidelines - Please Read!

[pclips]

Hi, everyone. This is all taking off very quickly and so I wanted to make some important policy statements right off the bat, to head off any misunderstandings about making fan and derivative content from Erfworld art and characters.

Two very important principles are true about Erfworld:

1. We passionately encourage Erfworld fans to express their enthusiasm, to participate, to advertise & get their friends to read, and to create new works in the Erfworld universe.

2. We are equally passionate about our ownership of the art, characters, story, dialogue, and trademarks of Erfworld.

These two principles might seem contradictory, but they really do not have to be. We plan to spend a lot of time, energy, and money to encourage fan works. We'll be providing things like high resolution source art, character notes, historical and geographical info, how-to-draw tutorials, and other useful materials. We'll run contests for fan art, fiction, animation and the like. We want to showcase the best of the fan works, and eventually we hope to be in the position to compensate them too.

But equally, we'll spend time, energy and money to stop any unlicensed commercial uses, trademark and copyright violation, trademark dilution, and other threats to Erfworld as a brand and a property.

This (locked and sticky) thread will be our policy statement and FAQ for matters of intellectual property rights. The main thing everyone needs to understand, though, is that Erfworld is an open sandbox to play in, but we created the sandbox and we own the sandbox. Jamie and I reserve the right to do anything with any fan content that we want to, including telling you "That's inappropriate; take it down and knock it off."

So please keep that in mind when you are creating any stuff related to Erfworld. There's more to come here, including an explanation of the Creative Commons license.