Copyrights and You (and Me)

I logged onto one of my favorite gaming sites the other day to find that their News section, right on the front page, was devoted to a very interesting article about the Diplomacy skill and its weaknesses, as well as possible solutions. It was a great article, except for one thing: it was my article. I wrote it last week on this website's message board (it's now morphed into the first "This Old Rule" article), and yet my name, copyright information, and website address appeared nowhere in the post. Anyone who read it would have been unaware that I wrote it, thus denying me the ability to take credit and build my career.

Reposting material from one website, in this case, mine, to another is a copyright violation. Don't let the OGL concept fool you: unless you are willing to post the entire OGL and apply the proper indications of OGC, you can't copy Open Game rules. And you can NEVER copy anything that isn't Open Game Content, such as personal discussions from another message board or "flavor" text. That goes for the Order of the Stick comics, too. Despite occasionally using game terms, they are in no way OGL; the use of game terms falls under the satire section of the Fair Use exception to copyright laws. And it applies equally to the message boards, to the news discussions, or to one's website's main content.

As a professional game writer, I rely on the sanctity of my copyrights to be able to make a living (or in this case, since no money was involved, to maintain a reputation). I'm really happy whenever someone likes one of my pieces, but if they like it so much, they should allow me to get the credit for it. If you want to submit news to another website about something on my (or anyone else's) site, submit news with a link to the original, such as this:

 

Rich Burlew has posted an interesting exploration of the Diplomacy skill and a possible alternate system on his website, www.giantitp.com. You can read it here.

Same effect, no copyright violation. I encourage anyone who wants to tell their friends about this site or its contents to spread the links wide and far, but please don't copy material and present it as your own. Or you could ask permission to reprint the article on another site; as long as you give credit, I am more than willing to consider it.

99.9% of the people reading this already know all of this, and wouldn't consider reposting my work. But not everyone knows the details of copyright laws, and the advent of the OGL has led some to think it's acceptable to copy any game-related material. It isn't.

Thanks for listening.

--Rich Burlew

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