3.5 Books

[RanWilde]

Would it be legal for me to upload my 3.5 books online for downloading?

I would not be charging anyone, nor would I be using anything other than my own website. I know how difficult it can be for someone to get the books for 3.5. I have a huge collection, over twenty-five books!

[Psyren]

Not without a copyright, which includes the license to distribute. (The fact that there is no profit involved doesn't matter.) Chances are you don't have one.

That's about as far as we can go for giving legal advice here.

[herrhauptmann]

Probably not legal.
The CK (not calvin klein) website got in trouble with one of their pdfs and had to take it down. Heck, GitP gets in trouble if WotC discovers that a lot of people here in the forums link to the CK site, so mods generally scrub the link when they find it. And that's just a compilation of data, no fluff or pictures.
I doubt you could even place an entire copy of the PHB online, even though it's all in the SRD. Those pictures, the fluff, and things like the names Tordek, Mialee, and Mordenkainen, are all copyrighted.

Heck, how did you come by all these pdf's in the first place? Unless you purchased each one legally (and have receipts), then you could be opening yourself up for legal action for pirating them.
It would be a good idea to check copyright laws in your state, whichever state your server is held in, and wherever WotC publishes from.


I do know, that a few years back, american copyright laws allowed a person to own pirated movies/shows, so long as the rights to distribute that material in USA wasn't owned by someone. So in the case of anime and manga, a lot of free translating sites had to shut down as soon as the japanese producer sold the rights to release it in the USA.
Oddly, a small form of protection for having copyrighted data that you stole from the internet existed. If you owned a legally purchased/released copy of the movie/book/whatever, and never put your pirated copy up on limewire/kazaa/torrents for others to copy it, nor did you ever make money off of owning the pirated copy, then your pirated digital copy was safe.
But, that was something like 7 years ago when I found that law. It's probably been changed.


Maybe if you restricted yourself to just OGL material, but I'm no lawyer. So everything is just random suppositions and assumptions by a random overtired dude who's not smart enough to turn off the computer

[RanWilde]

All of these books are stored in both paper format and stored in a digital format. This means that I bought/received/borrowed the book and then scanned it into my computer and transformed them into PDFs.

I have done this with every book I own simply for the ease I can now cross reference different items, creatures and rules. I can easily remove the copyrighted sections of the books (such as the names of characters) and rename them. Also, I thought that under the open gaming license I was given a little bit of leeway with the way I used the books...

[Yuki Akuma]

It's probably legal to make backups of your own stuff. It's completely illegal to give it to someone else.

The open gaming license only applies to certain material found in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, the Expanded Players Handbook, Unearthed Arcana and Deities and Demigods.

But you still can't just photocopy the pages, you have to type it out yourself.

[RanWilde]

Woop-de-doo. Can I give select passages to players in my campaign as informative material?

[Yuki Akuma]

You can totally do that, sure. That's "Fair Use" if I ever saw it.

Note: I am in no way a legal professional. This is not legal advice, etc.

[RanWilde]

You can totally do that, sure. That's "Fair Use" if I ever saw it.

Note: I am in no way a legal professional. This is not legal advice, etc.

Don't worry, I would never expect that of anyone on the internet. Thank you very much!

[Yora]

But all the parts that are really neccessary are already available online for free. And have been so for years.

http://www.d20srd.org/
This is everything that is legal to put online. Everything that is not in the System Reference Document, is not.

[Foryn Gilnith]

http://www.d20srd.org/
This is everything that is legal to put online. Everything that is not in the System Reference Document, is not.

What about the items found at http://brilliantgameologists.com/boa...p?topic=1109.0 and the ToB maneuver cards?

[Boci]

What about the items found at http://brilliantgameologists.com/boa...p?topic=1109.0 and the ToB maneuver cards?

Well ToB isn't open game content so we cannot legally put it up on the internet, even though WotC chose to do it themselves.

Probably not legal.
The CK (not calvin klein) website got in trouble with one of their pdfs and had to take it down. Heck, GitP gets in trouble if WotC discovers that a lot of people here in the forums link to the CK site, so mods generally scrub the link when they find it.

Crystalkeep? Surely the fact that 1 of their pdfs was taken down implies that the rest are okay.

[averagejoe]

The Mod They Call Me: It is against the rules to give legal advice on these boards. I don't see how this discussion can go on without people doing so. Thread locked.