White Wolf Applying License to Indie Games

Enigma23 writes "White Wolf, Inc. has decided to enforce a licensing system upon those who run their games in their World of Darkness. Here is the full text of the license. The Licensing process will force those who have not already joined the Camarilla, White Wolf's official fan club, to pay a yearly $20 fee. They're not going to go after games that don't charge money for the event, but the wording is such that they can legally sue those who don't comply even if they only charge enough money to cover costs. The practical upshot is that technically the WW Stormtroopers could raid your house merely if everyone chips in a few quid for pizza. This is evidently doubly so if anyone in your gaming group is under the age of 18, which is against the membership policy of The Camarilla. There is a further discussion on RPG.net about the various issues involved." The BoingBoing discussion is interesting, as well.

Comments

Re:This seems pretty silly

[cpt kangarooski]

Yes, but it's harder.

It's not significantly harder.

And you don't get the ability to copy at-will from certain of their rulebooks

But you can copy their rules, and given the merger doctrine, you can probably closely approach their expression, at a minimum.

you don't get the feel-good sensation of contriuting to copyleft.

Sure you can -- you can still just GPL the text, or whatever.

And, to be pendatic, you're confusing the d20 System Trademark license with the OGL. The latter is the copyleft-inspired free-to-all one; the former is the one that lets you use the "d20 System" trademark.

To be more pedantic, you misspelled 'pedantic.' Also, I didn't confuse them, I conflated them. They're both pretty useless, IMO. You can write d20 compatable books without agreeing to their license, and you can use the d20 trademark to the degree that you advertise your book's compatability with their system. It's rather akin to how people are allowed to say that their software is Windows compatable, or whatever, without needing permission from MS.

(Not to mention that if you want to do MORE than modules--like, oh, make your own RPG game that's simliar to but different from D&D--the law gets a heck of a lot fuzzier.)

No. Rules are totally uncopyrightable. To protect a game rule, you need a patent. I'm only aware of one patent in the field; it's to do with Magic cards. Given that you cannot patent something 1 year after publishing it, and that there are some other limitations, it'd be difficult to get a patent for anything in the RPG field that was of import. Cost also probably plays a factor.

You can write your own d20 rulebook, or change the rules (though this will affect compatability, and thus your ability to use the d20 mark), at will.

You need only reword the rules yourself, so as to copy their idea, but not their expression of it. And where there are few viable expressions, you can probably even copy that too, due to merger.

The law's not that fuzzy.

First Sale Doctrine

[Detritus]

They might want to look at Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, a Supreme Court decision that said that a copyright owner can't impose arbitrary restrictions on the purchaser under the guise of a license.

Cross posting:

[Godeke]

This is what I posted over there... interested in seeing if it stays:

There are only four things that White Wolf can hang this license: Patent, Copyright, Contract Law and Trademarks.

Note... I'm not a lawyer, but I make a living off of software which means I have to deal with all of these issues all the time. That said, this isn't legal advice (if you plan on taking a legal action may I suggest you talk to your lawyer instead of using random Internet posts as your basis).

Patent: If White Wolf had a patent on the rule system they have total control over the use of the same. A quick search of the patent databases show that they own nothing of the sort, so we can discount this as a "patent license".

Copyright: Copyright covers a very limited (but powerful) set of controls. The long and short of it is that a copyright protects *replication* of a work. If a group were to recite the rulebook and fictional pieces therein, White Wolf would be within their rights to stop this from happening. However, as people in the board game industry painfully know, people *playing* your rules do not trigger copyright. (A similar thing happens in software: technically running software requires copying it into RAM... because this is required as a "fundamental step" to using the copyrighted materials this replication is permitted by law). Only patent can control game *rules* as ideas.

TSR attempted this type of control, claiming that being compatible with or working with a given rule set made something a derived work back in the bad old days. They failed miserably, except at intimidation (you can't *afford* to fight this). To exert this kind of control would be akin to writing a text book on a subject and then saying "using this knowledge is forbidden unless licensed" (assuming the knowledge was not covered by a patent, which is independent). Copyright does not give this sort of control.

In particular, the information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._ Straus is interesting because it shows that copyright law does *not* allow any restrictions (beyond replication) after the "first sale" of a work. The software industry has been angry for years about reselling "used" console games and rentals of the same (it cuts into profits *big-time*), but every lawsuit brought on the matter has fallen on the side of "no further restrictions beyond the first sale". The companies have tried the "you don't own this, you just license it" thing in the past will no effect... because of the doctrine of first sale. (Note, this limitation doesn't apply to big corporations who buy software in bulk: they actually sign a contract.)

Contract: That brings us to contract law. When you bought the book, you didn't sign anything, so any claims based on contract law are nonsense. Even printing a contract in the book won't work... only if you *negotiated* a contract *as equals* (i.e., you have the ability to reject terms and negotiate) and then signed the contract would the contract be binding. "Click wrap" licenses in software are on some pretty shoddy legal basis themselves and have been successfully avoided in quite a few lawsuits and this "retrofitting" of a contract onto a book is absurd to contemplate in terms of contract law.

Trademark: So that leaves us with trademark law. This seems to be what prompted the whole nonsense. Note the comment about "rights in terms of trademark and so forth"... trademark is the *only* framework that requires protection of rights to be proactive, so you can just delete "and so forth". (People who use the term "Intellectual Property" are talking about patent, copyright and trademark... there is nothing actually called "Intellectual Property" in law). However, if this is a trademark license then the whole issue can be safely bypassed by not *using* the trademarks in question. You can run a "Modern era live RPG featuring vampires"... even with White Wolf systems as the core