So I’m setting up a new D&D campaign, and doing world-building. Its been postponed a couple of times, so I had more time than I originally expected, and I’m starting to feel the results are getting pretty good. Its kindof become a creative outlet. In the process I have been mining the internet for poems, mostly public domain, pictures which are not, and songs, a mixed bag.
Now I feel that assembling this into documents for showing a small group of close friends in a private setting is fair enough.
However, I do feel that what I’m making is good, and would like feedback from outside my local lot. And here is where I start to worry; that if I make it available for downloading, even by a select group of people, it could get out of my control. And from a copyright perspective, even if this is a private document and no profit is being made, I feel much less certain this would be fair.
Is there any level of disclaimers or references that would be normal in such cases ?
The most correct thing to do would be to look up every work you’ve used, determine their copyright status (this alone can be a big task!) and then either comply with the existing terms, contact them to ask for permission, or remove the work from your distribution of materials.
There’s no disclaimer you can put on this to make it not copyright infringement. (Although you frequently see people on YouTube type stuff like “no copyright infringement intended” or similar on their video descriptions; legally this means nothing.) And what you’re doing doesn’t appear to meet any standards of Fair Use, as far as I can determine. And giving the product away for free doesn’t make it immune to copyright law.
You could release it anyway with the hopes that:
Since you’re a small fry, people might not notice the copyright infringement
If an artist does notice it, you might be able to get away with paying them a nominal fee for the work
Seek permission or look for copylefted / creative commons / WOTC first party works (under their fan content policy) that can replace your current copyrighted materials. Nothing about what you are doing qualifies as fair use. Works in the USA are copyrighted by default as soon as they are created and you are violating their copyrights, even in your own private small-group use.
Isn’t one of the criteria for Fair Use that the user not be profiting from it? He’s got that one covered, at least. But yeah, that’s the only criterion he meets, and while the law is vague on just what constitutes fair use, just being noncommercial almost certainly isn’t enough.
(IIRC, the other criteria are criticism, archiving, and use of only a small portion of the original work)
Hm. You seem to be correct about Fair Use, which made me wonder how I had that concept so wrong. So I did what I should have done before posting the question and looked up the our national laws in Norway. I guess I had some idea that copyright was an internationally treaty-regulated concept.
So the local laws say I can use such works privately, provided I do not profit, the work is legally published, I do not pass myself off as the creator or the work as original, and as long as I do not use it for other purpose. Or distribute it. With a few other restrictions that are not relevant in this case. This would be what I had confused with Fair Use.
So I seem to be in the clear for a small group of friends, but not for letting anyone else download it sadly. Even before considering that this would bring in other jurisdictions.
Not as large as it would look at first glance. The poetry is all in the public domain. I could take out a few songs and all most of the art and be in the clear. However, without the art I do not think it would be as good.
No, private use includes “privatsfæren” the private sphere. Which includes friends and family. You could for example show a Disney movie to all the kids in your child’s sixth birthday party.
Hm. I had only thought in terms of embedding it, but I can see that there would be ways of setting up a document that actually contained only the link. I’d have to drop some of the songs, but that is only a small part of it.
I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe so, because the use of the item would not be communal. All the examples refer to items used as a group. “Family, close friends as well as other closed groups where there is a personal relation between the participants” I do not see communal use specified anywhere though. For example a song text copied up for singing at a wedding or other celebration would be covered… There is some room for interpretation however. I would imagine that passing out the texts in advance of the wedding so people could practice would be legal.
This is in any case not copying without compensation, the government pays the organization of copyright holders a sum for this kind of copying. Private citizens may assume (are not required to check) that the copyright holder of the work is a member.
The (US) law doesn’t actually specify anything that fulfills fair use. It just lists criteria to be considered, but doesn’t say anything about how to weight those criteria, leaving that instead for the courts. The more criteria you meet, the better your case, but with the law as it stands, you could in principle claim fair use with only one criterion, and a court could in principle reject a claim with all but one of the criteria. Though of course, there’s also precedent of other court cases to go by.
But yes, that’s just for US law, and other countries will differ. Some aspects of copyright law are the subject of international treaty, but the details can apparently differ.
Norway doesn’t seem to have a fair use doctrine per se and I don’t want to further hijack this thread with inapplicable US policies. Those interested might be better served by looking at actual US fair use case law, but beyond that, probably another thread is more appropriate? I’ll say no more on this topic.
The best thing to do, would be to contact the copyright holders and seek permission. I have done this and in many situations not only was I granted permission I was allowed access to additional content that wasn’t available elsewhere to use.
The thing you don’t want to do, is just put it out there and see what happens. Besides it being taken down, that can get you into legal trouble. Ask their permission first.
Often when asking for permission they ask details about its use. Like if it going to be make available and to what size audience, etc. From that they make a decision.
A friend of mine wanted to do a short film based on a short story published in a book. He contacted the estate and they liked his treatment and usage and they granted him permission for a very small sum of money.
Nothing uploaded on the internet is private or safe. If there’s enough interest in obtaining it, someone will figure out a way how. From the simple screencap to breaking into the server housing the files.
If the work is passed on and the copyright holders acquire it from someone else, how can they accuse you of distributing it? Basically something you used as a handout for a weekend of fun at a private party was taken and passed on by who know whom… So the people who directly passed it on are the ones doing the illicit distributing.
OTOH, if you post someone’s artwork or longish quotes from someone else’s work, you are the one who posted it and therefore distributed it.
At least in the U.S. (and I recognize that the OP is not in the U.S.), when it comes to roleplaying games like D&D, my understanding is that using copyrighted material as a gamemaster, specifically for use in a game you, personally, run for other people, isn’t generally seen as running afoul of fair use.
But, “publishing” the contents of a game adventure that you’ve written, even if you aren’t doing so for profit, probably does run afoul of fair use. And, this includes giving another gamemaster a copy of your adventure to run.
My cite for this is my involvement in several “organized play” RPG campaigns, which specifically got “cease and desist” letters from WotC when they were using WotC’s copyrighted material in adventures that they were giving to gamemasters to run.
If running a D&D game using copyrighted material is acceptable, it’s not under the doctrine of Fair Use, but under the far older legal doctrine of Don’t Get Caught.
Well, as I understand it, from the standpoint of using published, copyrighted game material (sourcebooks, adventures, etc.), the concept is that when the gamemaster is running a game for a group of players, he’s (a) using the materials as they were intended to be used by the publisher, and (b) their use in this manner isn’t considered to be “publishing” the copyrighted content to the other players.
That said, the OP also indicated that he had incorporated materials that likely were not the product of a game publisher (poems, pictures, songs) into his adventure. Using things like that in a game you run may well be a case of Don’t Get Caught.
