Community 3.5 Conversions of 3.0 Books

[willpell]

Example: Arms and Equipment Guide, Book of Vile Darkness, Savage Species. Wotco never updated them to 3.5 rules.

1. Is it legal for the community to create a full conversion of these books to the new ruleset?

2. If it's legal, has anyone done it?

3. If it's legal and no one has done it, should I? I'm specifically thinking of the AEG in this regard, as it seems like it'd be the easiest one to tackle.

[Jeraa]

If it isn't in the SRD, it is not Open Content. While you could do it for your own personal use, you can't distribute it.

[willpell]

Well that's infuriating. Wotco stopped making money off the rules years ago, but they get to keep a stranglehold on them forever, impairing the ability for former customers to enjoy their product until the end of time?

EDIT - Second paragraph redacted since I already pretty much know the answer and would probably be gagged by the moderators for having the gall to pose the question.

[Malachei]

Wotco stopped making money off the rules years ago, but they get to keep a stranglehold on them forever,

Not forever. IIRC, it is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. So our grandchildren or their children can finish the project. :smallbiggrin:

[willpell]

Not forever. IIRC, it is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. So our grandchildren or their children can finish the project. :smallbiggrin:

That helps, really. Wouldn't it be nice if our country ever tried to do what's right by the people who are actually alive right now, instead of their theoretical descendants (which I, for one, intend never to have)? It's one thing for copyright to protect the company's current profits (even there I don't approve, but I can see the logic even if I don't agree with it, as I know my beliefs are thoroughly difficult for most people to comprehend), but there is absolutely no sane reason why the company should have any right to sue someone for breaking a copyright which hasn't been used in five years.

[Malachei]

I must say I think copyright is very important for authors, and I like legislation that protects creative work.

Regarding a company, well, look at their perspective: If you're the inventor of the G&G roleplaying game, and have started a company, which is now selling your game in its 2nd edition, you'd probably want to keep your copyright to protect your current revenues from clones of previous editions.

I think the economic mistake WOTC made when they licensed their products to Paizo shows what can happen when your copyright does not protect you. 5th edition will have a hard time winning a fan base that is not only firmly grounded in 3.5, but also getting a stable flow of new products from Pathfinder. Because Pathfinder is mostly compatible, effectively 3.5 lives on, and their own previous edition is now WOTC's worst competitor.

In the above example, somebody could copy your 1st edition and drive your company out of business at a critical moment when your 2nd edition was still weak.

[willpell]

I must say I think copyright is very important for authors, and I like legislation that protects creative work.

There are two reasons why a work might need to be copyrighted: to prevent someone who didn't create it from making money off it, and to prevent ba(itsthenameofabigsword)rdization of a work. The latter is dubious IMO; if someone wants to write a story where Superman turns into a heroin-addicted rent boy, this shouldn't be a problem as long as there is no confusion about the fact that the story is non-canonical and only the work of that particular author, who they can boycott and flame for his terrible taste; I would rather allow free expression for both a slimeball author and his vehement lambasters than for neither.

And as for money, I believe that an author writes first and foremost to express what is within his soul, and that he needs money only to keep body and soul together and purchase whatever sources of inspiration he needs to keep creating. No one should ever lack a livelihood IMO, but I don't tend to feel that it should be in the form of working for a wage or selling one's productions (I would prefer some form of utopian socialism based on both objective and subjective assessments of the value of your contribution to society, regardless of whether it's as an artist or a janitor or anything in between). And even if we take it for granted that an author must sell his writing, I don't believe copyright is the correct method for ensuring his ability to do so.

Getting lawyers involved in a matter of art under any circumstances strikes me as being about as reasonable as hiring sharks to bodyguard a gazelle; the question is not whether it is a bad idea, but which of several reasons why it won't work is most important.


Regarding a company, well, look at their perspective: If you're the inventor of the G&G roleplaying game, and have started a company, which is now selling your game in its 2nd edition, you'd probably want to keep your copyright to protect your current revenues from clones of previous editions.

I despise any form of thought which says that keeping your ability to rake in piles of cash justifies reducing the mental enrichment of society. Treating players as a resource to be competed over, instead of as people who want to have fun and deserve every tool they could conceivably enjoy using, including "competing" game options, is intolerable to me, the worst kind of small-minded oppression.


I think the economic mistake WOTC made when they licensed their products to Paizo shows what can happen when your copyright does not protect you. 5th edition will have a hard time winning a fan base that is not only firmly grounded in 3.5, but also getting a stable flow of new products from Pathfinder. Because Pathfinder is mostly compatible, effectively 3.5 lives on, and their own previous edition is now WOTC's worst competitor.

No doubt they think of it in these terms. Me? I'm deleriously happy Pathfinder exists, but I don't play it, partly because it doesn't contain Beholders and Slaads and several other aspects of the core canon which I love, but also because I don't approve of some of the rules they changed (such as folding Hide and Move Silently into a single Stealth skill, when IMO they are thoroughly different applications that both say specific and interesting things about the character's choices between them). In a more general sense, more options are always better, and it is cruel and hateful to restrict the supply of anything for any reason. There should always be more prosperity; let companies make money in a way that involves creating more new products, not trying to reduce the number of alternatives to their existing product. If the latter is quicker and cheaper and more efficient, too bad. There are all manner of atrocities in the world which were justified on the basis that they were efficient and got results; I believe that this kind of ruthlessly draconian thinking must be opposed absolutely.

(As an example of the kind of economic "logic" which I believe must be opposed, I read an article in City Pages a month or two back which described how the dairy industry padded their profits once by purchasing immense numbers of dairy cows and killing them, for no reason at all other than to reduce world milk supply so they could raise prices due to increased demand. I don't care how much money they made through this "visionary marketing strategy"; I regard it as a criminal act and would happily see the entire dairy industry dismantled for having permitted it, if I were capable of doing the job. No amount of justification is sufficient for either the cows murdered or the humans extorted of more money through a scheme like this one.)


In the above example, somebody could copy your 1st edition and drive your company out of business at a critical moment when your 2nd edition was still weak.

Then the 2nd edition shouldn't be weak. If 1E isn't broken, don't fix it. If you don't have an audience crying out that they want new material, leave it alone. If you do have an audience but it's not big enough to create the new edition, then say so, and host a Kickstarter or something until you can do the new one. Too many business decisions are made on the basis of assumptions and projections; very rarely does a business actually talk to their market and say, "This is what we have, this is what we need, what would you like us to do?"

I want to see all businesses operate on a basis of complete transparency, enforced by an utterly neutral and financially independent government arbiter whose sole priority is to police the ethicality and public-good-commitment of companies, and utterly immune to any possibility of being corrupted by them. (That I don't actually know of a way to do that, short of space aliens from a post-scarcity planet conquering us to impose superhuman justice without an or-else, is beside the point. I know, from a pragmatic standpoint, it's not, but I detest pragmatism anyway, specifically because it allows for people to logically justify behavior which they intuitively know is wrong, assuming they aren't sociopaths. And even if the statistic that 10% of people are functionally sociopathic, possessing no empathy at all, is accurate, I don't think 10% is enough of the populace that we should officially sanction their cruelty. Nor would be 90%. 99.999, maybe, but even that would leave millions of people suffering for "logical" reasons, and that implies that logic as a concept should be rejected for the sake of humanity.)

[hamishspence]

Maybe you could simply identify all the feats, PRCs, monsters, etc that have been updated- in Fiendish Codex 1, Fiendish Codex 2, Magic Item Compendium, Heroes of Horror, Dragon Magazine, and so forth, and post "suggestions" for everything else?

Like
"Corrupt Spell"- updated in Complete Divine
"Rutterkin"- updated in Fiendish Codex 2.
"disciple of Mephistopheles PRC" - suggestion- replace Innuendo with Bluff, replace Scry with Knowledge (dungeoneering)

And so on.

[Taelas]

{{scrubbed}}

[willpell]

Also (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a lawyer), while Wizards of the Coast holds the copyrights to those books, they are no longer in print; they would have to prove loss of sales to get compensation, and given they are not in print...

Corporations don't only care about whether they're getting money today. With the (IMO utterly insane and evil) way the corporate legal system works, they may be tentatively planning to do something ten years from now which wouldn't work if they didn't prove their ownership of copyright now, so just in case it might make them money in ten years, they'll destroy someone's life over it today. A good example of this prinicple is the utterly terrible Fantastic 4 movie - no, not the one with Jessica Alba, but the first one about ten years before that, which was intentionally filmed on a shoestring budget and never released, just so the studio could retain the rights to the Fantastic 4 and prevent any of their competitors from making money off it, even if they had no plans do so themselves anytime soon. They are not required to be logical; they've paid millions of dollars to own rights and they'll pay millions more dollars to avoid letting anything reduce the value of that first investment, even if it isn't actually helping them either.

[willpell]

Also (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a lawyer), while Wizards of the Coast holds the copyrights to those books, they are no longer in print; they would have to prove loss of sales to get compensation, and given they are not in print...

Corporations don't only care about whether they're getting money today. With the (IMO utterly insane and evil) way the corporate legal system works, they may be tentatively planning to do something ten years from now which wouldn't work if they didn't prove their ownership of copyright now, so just in case it might make them money in ten years, they'll destroy someone's life over it today. A good example of this prinicple is the utterly terrible Fantastic 4 movie - no, not the one with Jessica Alba, but the first one about ten years before that, which was intentionally filmed on a shoestring budget and never released, just so the studio could retain the rights to the Fantastic 4 and prevent any of their competitors from making money off it, even if they had no plans do so themselves anytime soon. They are not required to be logical; they've paid millions of dollars to own rights and they'll pay millions more dollars to avoid letting anything reduce the value of that first investment, even if it isn't actually helping them either.

In any event, even if I had a magic time-viewer thingy that would tell me absolutely that Wotco will not sue over my project, I still couldn't put it up on these forums if it's even theoretically and technically a copyright violation. These moderators are incredibly overzealous about anything that even might get them in the slightest bit of trouble, so I have no ability to put this project up on this site, and thus it'll never reach an audience of any size.