Quote from: Matt;817704Anyone familiar with IP, copyright, and trademark law would know this is the truth. If you fail to defend your rights, you establish precedent and the next time someone infringes they can point to your prior failure to do so and you may well end up losing your rights. This is why huge corporations like Disney have to send C&D letters to places like "Mickey Mouse Nonprofit Mom & Pop Preschool." It's not because they want to look like mean a-holes picking on nice people doing good things.

This relates to trade marks, which have to be asserted (though only vs commercial use). Not copyright.
Also if the user says "Mickey Mouse is a trade mark of Disney Corporation. Used without permission" then Disney doesn't have to (threaten to) sue them because there is no risk of dilution.

Quote from: Omega;817817Or Princess Ryan's Space Marines by Simtac in 86. In 97 Avalon Hill was doing a reprint and GW informed them they now owned the title "Space Marine" so AH retitled the game Princess Ryan's Star Marines.

Use it or lose it.

Games Workshop's lawyers are a bunch of liars, though. 'Space Marine' is a generic term for spaceship soldiers going back at least to the 1930s, and they've not been able to register it for books about space marines. Check out 'Spots the Space Marine', where they made amazon pull the book from sale without any legal basis. Eventually the EFF got involved and amazon put it back up. GM's law-trolls still claimed to have nebulous rights* in the term even though the TM registries clearly disagree.

GW likewise claim to own Michael Moorcock's 8-pointed Chaos star.

Basically what GW do is make spurious claims as a 'chilling effect'; if they can stop everyone else from using a generic term then eventually it might conceivably become distinctive to them and thus registerable, just as TM'd terms like hoover & aspirin may become generic.

*You can register 'space marine' for unrelated subject matter such as a line of paints. You can't register it for books about space marines. Even if a register mistakenly allowed that (which happens) the mark would not survive a court challenge.

Edit: Anyway, bringing up the vile practices of GW is a reminder that WoTC are generally ok by comparison.

Quote from: Matt;818428Sorry, you CAN lose copyright due to inaction. This is why many golden age super hero comics  characters and old movies became public domain. The owners failed to register at all or failed to renew.

You have been misinformed.

Old (pre the 1950s Universal Copyright Convention) US copyright law still required registration. Hence golden age superhero comics may never have had copyright protection - also true for Conan and other 1930s pulp magazine stories.

That has not been the case for decades. Current copyright law in the US is in line with international norms (Berne Convention, TRIPS) and has no formalities requirements.

Quote from: RPGPundit;818784What all this means is nothing will now be entering public domain until 2071.  Which is absurd.

How do you get that? Since the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, in-copyright publisher-owned works have a 95 year term from creation (up from 75, so a cartoon from 1925 that was in-copyright in the USA in 1998 will have copyright only until 2020.

This article seems accurate - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/25/15-years-ago-congress-kept-mickey-mouse-out-of-the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again/

Quote from: Mistwell;818939I disagree.  A copyright infringer can argue waiver (or similar defenses), based on your non-enforcement of other users from someone other than the infringer in question.

Do you have any evidence for that I can check out (even wikipedia)? I teach UK TM & (c), the weirdness of American law-in-practice (as opposed to the legislation, which looks much like ours/rest of world's) is always fascinating to me.

Quote from: jhkim;818956As an academic possibility, I agree with you. I myself brought up laches as a defense that an infringer could bring. However, the point is that you do not lose copyright by not using it - just as you don't lose property rights by not using them.  The infringer can argue for reduced damages because they were deceived by your not enforcing - along the lines of "I thought it was OK since everyone else was doing it." However, it is still your property.

Yes, it's relevant to damages for past harm. Once you are notified you can't (AFAIK) use previous non-enforcement to argue against an injunction to stop further use, even in the USA.

It's just like trespass to property, as you say: "I thought I was allowed to use the field, everyone else did" may mean you're not liable for past use of the field,  but won't stop the owner from keeping you out in future.

You can multi-quote you know.

Quote from: One Horse Town;819036You can multi-quote you know.

Don't think I've ever successfully managed to do that, on any board. Luddite or lazy I guess.

Quote from: S'mon;819021Edit: Anyway, bringing up the vile practices of GW is a reminder that WoTC are generally ok by comparison.

And that really is the pathetic part of all this. For all their fuck ups and screw overs and total half assedness. They still treat the fans and retailers better than GW ever will.

Quote from: Omega;819050And that really is the pathetic part of all this. For all their fuck ups and screw overs and total half assedness. They still treat the fans and retailers better than GW ever will.

Damning with faint praise that is. Its like saying, "as bad as this rpg is, at least its not FATAL". GW has set themselves up as the pinnacle of geek hobby parasite deuchebags these last few years. One of the reasons that I've been swayed over to Oldhammer and am seriously considering Warmachine\Hordes.

Quote from: GameDaddy;818875Hrmmm. No. This is a tragedy. So much written material and creations will be abandoned by their creators, yet no one will be able to use it, or to create new derivative materials based on the original material.

So what? I've never understood the sense of entitlement people have for using other people's creations, or even the desire. You like Conan? Cool. Make up your own barbarian character and write stories about him. Why do you need to use stuff other people made up?

But then I find fanfic in general absolutely baffling and kinda pathetic. It comes across as a desperate desire belong to something else, rather than a healthy creative endeavour.

I think the largest problem with super super long copyright is not people being able to create new things, but the original creations being lost when they are no longer published/created.

I've talked about this with like, older video games, which has this problem a lot. Anything SNES or NES generation that wasn't popular enough to sell a ton of copies, or show up on something like Virtual Console, just stops existing as a thing anyone can get into without going through collector's channels or downloading them illegally.

Quote from: Haffrung;819081So what? I've never understood the sense of entitlement people have for using other people's creations, or even the desire. You like Conan? Cool. Make up your own barbarian character and write stories about him. Why do you need to use stuff other people made up?

But then I find fanfic in general absolutely baffling and kinda pathetic. It comes across as a desperate desire belong to something else, rather than a healthy creative endeavour.

Do you feel the same way about the writers of superhero comics, or writers on television shows that did not create the characters they are writing for?

How about covers of people's songs (especially those that are quite distinct from the original)?

While you say you do not understand even the desire to use other peoples' creations, does that hold for the players of every RPG written based on a pre-existing IP ever? If not the players, do you feel it holds for the authors of those products? For children playing with G.I. Joes, Barbies and Transformers?

I mean, it just seems like a very natural kind of play that humans do, doesn't it?

I don't see the big deal, hand write your stupid characters and you have nothing to worry about?  5e isn't rocket science, all mine are hand written anyways.  So this guy got his site scrubbed, whoop-ti-do-da, who gives a flying shit?  I know I don't because I hand write out all my PC's, in 2e & 5e, not hard.

Quote from: S'mon;819024How do you get that? Since the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, in-copyright publisher-owned works have a 95 year term from creation (up from 75, so a cartoon from 1925 that was in-copyright in the USA in 1998 will have copyright only until 2020.

This article seems accurate - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/25/15-years-ago-congress-kept-mickey-mouse-out-of-the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again/

I miswrote; I actually meant that something created in 1976 wouldn't go into the public domain until 1971.

In any case, nothing came into the public domain last year, nor will it this year, and there's no question that the Parasites will argue for it to keep being extended indefinitely.