Quote from: Emperor Norton;815675Whoa, did not expect that one. I've talked to Chris before and he always seemed like a nice enough guy. Any more details on this? My google-fu isn't working.

Hunted and hunted. Was NOT Perrin. Nore was it about the use of the word Mecha. My goof. Got notes mixed up on whos doing what to who.

Was John Wick over his Aegis Project mecha RPG C&Ding or requesting AEGIS change their mecha board game name. Here was the OP.

QuoteI have a quick inquiry that I'd love some input on:

We make a game called 'A.E.G.I.S. - Combining Robot Strategy Game', for a while it was known as "Project AEGIS" while it was still, well, a school project. Months passed and now we're still working on it, and it's looking really sharp and we've taken it to cons, yadda yadda. Our facebook blog is still titled "Project AEGIS"

One day a few months ago we got a message from a certain prolific board game designer personally asking us to C&D, because he had self-published a game through his website some years back called "The Aegis Project".

I can understand why he would jump the gun, so we had a little back and forth about how "project aegis" wasn't the final title of the game at all, and it turns out that no matter what, he is upset that "Aegis" is in the title of the game. His argument being that his game is a tabletop game involving robots and so is ours.

(To clarify, his game is a Pencil&Paper D&D-style interactive story that has mecha in the lore called "Aegises", while our's is a chess-y skirmish game that looks like mecha Pokemon. The two have no visual, mechanical, narrative or target audience overlap at all and it would be very, very hard to confuse them.)

We assured him that we had no interest in violating his copyright at all and the conversation just sort of died, but he may still be sour. After some research and consult, his game is only mentioned around 3 places on the internet and is incredibly obscure, and in vlogs he states that "the game isn't about robots", which was one of his arguments. He also has no registered copyright or trademarks at all.

I've been meaning to personally have a dialogue with him, since it was never quite settled. Also our game is moving forward towards sell-ability and I have no interest in changing the name since it ties directly into the mechanics of the game (Five different classes: Assault/evasive/Guard/Intel/Support).

What to do???

Quote from: Will;814765You have to defend your IP even when it's stupid or else when it matters you've cut yourself down at the knees.

I miss OGL, but without it, Hasbro pretty much has to act against anyone who gets a certain degree of exposure.

No, you only have to act to maintain a monopoly on commercial use of your trade marks as badges of origin. You don't have to do anything re copyright.

Quote from: Will;815679The spirit of Godwin is in applying Nazis to topics where they really aren't related.

When we're talking about discounting responsibility and claim 'I was just following orders,' the Nuremberg Trials ARE PRECISELY the legal focus that showed the ultimate reason for invalidating this defense.

As usual, people inevitably miss the fucking point and say stupid crap like 'oh, you're calling all CEOs war criminals?'

Because strawmen make much easier targets.

Except Nazi war criminal wasn't applied to CEOs. It was appliec to the individual shareholders of a publicly traded company. Let's review for the reading impaired.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815360I'd much rather individual owners of a corporation be held legally responsible than getting a legal "out".

Quote from: Bren;815393It is not really feasible to hold the owners of a corporation responsible. In a large publicly traded company there are thousands even handreds of thousands of individual shareholders. And those individual shareholders typically don't know the ins and outs of management decisions and even if they did, do not hold enough power to influence those decisions except, possibly, when acting in mass.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815402Which is the same defense they heard at Nuremberg time and time again.

1. TristramEvans wants to hold invidual owners of companies (not the CEO alone) legally responsible.

2. Bren responds that its not feasible to hold all the owners responsible in a publicly traded company because there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of owners who don't know the ins and outs of mangament decisions and who can't control management on their own.

3. TristramEvans then compares the individual shareholders to Nazi warcriminals.

Godwin indeed.

Quote from: rawma;815693You describe a deal that explains copyright, that creators are granting eventual entry to the public domain in return for protection of their right in the near term; then you're surprised that this is understood to mean that you believe that, in the absence of copyright, they have an eternal natural right and are only giving up the tail end of that in return for what copyright offers them. This is the biased framing in your posts that both jhkim and I pointed out.

OK. For the sake of argument let's say that I am biased towards the notion that inventors actually invented what they invented. Creators actually created what they created. And that because of that creative action they are more entitled to any value provided by their creation than every Tomasina, Dick, and Harriet because those creations are the product of human intellectual activity and those ideas don't exist in some Platonic world of forms owned by society at large.

So fucking what?

Quote from: Bren;8157401. TristramEvans  believes that all owners of companies (not the CEO alone) are ethically responsible.

2. Bren responds that its not fair to hold all the owners responsible because they don't know the ins and outs of managment decisions and who can't control management on their own.

3. TristramEvans then compares that defence to the defence used by members of the Nazi party after WWII

Godwin indeed.

Fixed that for you

Can we just agree that WOTC are habitual or compulsive screw-ups? Because they are.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815747Fixed that for you

You said legally responsible not ethically. You might want to fix your quote not my paraphrase of your quote.

I can't believe you need this spelled out, but apparently you are actually unable to read and understand your own words.

Nazi war criminals personally performed and ordered crimes for which they did not want to be held responsible because they themselves were following orders. This is what Nurenberg was all about.

Individual shareholders did not perform crimes. Nor did they order crimes performed nor did they even know ahead of time what actions managment was taking.

The people running companies in which those individual shareholders own shares committed or ordered to commit whatever crimes you are referring to.

You compared the people owning shares, people who did not themselves commit any crimes or even know that crimes were being committed to Nazi war criminals who personally ordered and performed genocide, murder, and torture. You didn't compare the management to Nazis.

Yeah Godwin indeed.

Quote from: Bren;815752Individual shareholders did not perform crimes. Nor did they order crimes performed nor did they even know ahead of time what actions managment was taking.

If nothing else, shareholders vote on policy and can even force a vote on policy if enough of them get together against management.

Talk about Nuremberg trials and "following orders" aside, this is actually a germane point because Hasbro is a publicly traded entity and if enough gamerz actually vote their proxies you can raise a bigger stink about the game unit's approach to consumer-generated derivatives. Submit a proposal.

Quote from: Bren;815752Yeah Godwin indeed.

You claimed that investers in a company shouldnt be held responsible for the actions of that company because they often dont know what a company is doing and dont have the power to change it.

I pointed out that members of the Nazi party after WWII claimed they shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of the Nazis because they didnt know what the nazi party was doing and didnt have the power to stop it.

The analogy isnt that hard to understand. We're talking 6th grade education level, here. On the SATs this would be a freebie.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815755You claimed that investers in a company shouldnt be held responsible for the actions of that company because they often dont know what a company is doing and dont have the power to change it.

Because they're not. Shareholders are not liable for a corporation's debt or personally responsible for any crimes the corporate entity may commit.

This is why lawsuits and criminal filings that implicate a corporation often name individual managers separately.

Perhaps some day a fantastic Nuremberg trial in heaven will bring all shareholders to account for what managers did with every penny of their money, but in the world we live in today the corporate structure exists to separate investors from liability.

Shareholders are very rarely in a position where "obeying orders" even comes up. Most are neither employees nor management. Unless they have a very high stake in the corporation (in which case they are usually management at some level), their responsibility is equally dilute. If they want to influence corporate policy, the proposal and proxy process makes that happen or doesn't -- whether a shareholder votes for or against a criminal policy and whether that policy is ever followed is ultimately irrelevant.

How this applies to the fundamentals of intellectual property, why you have a copyright office or whether old guys get cheated by fixed protection terms, I don't know.

Quote from: econobus;815756Because they're not. Shareholders are not liable for a corporation's debt or personally responsible for any crimes the corporate entity may commit.

No, they're not. Legally.

My point was that they are ethically, hence they should be legally, assuming an ethical legal system.


At least that was my point many moons ago, before Bren began his strawman campaign.


I can't at this point recall why I even made that point. I still agree with it wholeheartedly, but it seems to have little relevance to anything else in regards to copyright. Maybe a spin-off of the idea that corporations shouldn't be able to own copyrights.

Which leads to a good idea:

Copyrights last 10 years, but can be renewed indefinitely by the original creator.
A corporation cannot renew a copyright.

So, the creator gets to own their own ideas their whole lives, and it remains in the hands of their estate several years after their death (I'm going to completely ignore Bren's insistence that the children of a creator are for some reason owed the ownership of things their parents create).

if a person sells their copyright to a company, or that company acquires a copyright through some means, they have at most 10 years to profit off of it.

It seems like that would fix not only the problems of indefinite copyright and IP hoarding, but also if a creator somehow got screwed by a company, he'd still probably get the chance to use his creations again within his lifetime.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815757No, they're not. Legally.

My point was that they are ethically.

Take it up with heaven.

Quote from: TristramEvans;815755You claimed that investers in a company shouldnt be held responsible for the actions of that company because they often dont know what a company is doing and dont have the power to change it.

No. I said, "It is not really feasible to hold the owners of a corporation responsible." That's not the same as shouldn't be held responsible. I do claim that likening the responsibility of individual shareholders to the responsibility of Nazi war criminals for their own crimes is idiotic.

QuoteI pointed out that members of the Nazi party after WWII claimed they shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of the Nazis because they didnt know what the nazi party was doing and didnt have the power to stop it.

Nurenberg were the trials of Nazi war criminals. Individual members of the Nazi party were not executed. Many moved on into positions of responsibility and wealth in the FDR. How again is Nurenberg relativant

QuoteThe analogy isnt that hard to understand. We're talking 6th grade education level, here. On the SATs this would be a freebie.

The analogy isn't hard to understand but clearly you don't understand it.

Here's what you don't understand.

• Who was on trial at Nurenberg. HINT: War criminals. This put on trial did not even come close to including the millions of Nazi Party members or the millions who voted for Nazi candidates before the war.
• That those war criminals were put on trial and were held responsible for their own actions not the actions of others.
• That individual members of the Nazi party were not they held accountable for the actions of others.
• That individual shareholders are not analogous to those Nazi war criminals tried at Nurenberg.
• At best you might compare individual shareholders to the millions of Nazi party members who did not themselves commit war crimes and who were never tried for any crime.

In fact in the latter case your analogy supports not holding individual shareholders responsible for the actions of the company.

If you had restricted your "analogy" to holding the decision makers like senior management and board members responsible we wouldn't be having a back and forth about how idiotic your Godwin is in this situation.

It's true that those decision makers are almost always shareholders, but they are a tiny, tiny fraction of the shareholders in a public company. And you didn't call out those shareholders you said all owners (i.e. shareholders) of the company should be held legally (not just ethically) responsible.

You are not as smart as a 6th grader.

Quote from: econobus;815758Take it up with heaven.

Yes, because laws never change.

Quote from: Bren;815760No. I said, "It is not really feasible to hold the owners of a corporation responsible." That's not the same as shouldn't be held responsible.

Then you admit you had no argument to make.

QuoteI do claim that likening the responsibility of individual shareholders to the responsibility of Nazi war criminals for their own crimes is idiotic.

Hans Fritzsche, Walther Funk, Gustav Krupp, Robert Ley, Baron Von Neurath, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Julius Streicher, Albert Speer

None of them war criminals. Your knowledge of history is as lacking as your ability to process metaphors on a grade school level.